Lifestyle
2 Teslas, the Pan-American Highway, and an extreme adventure
Driving an electric vehicle down the Pan-American Highway is no easy feat but a team in two Teslas is doing just that. Life is a journey and sometimes we find ourselves in the most interesting places. This is literally true for Electric Americas Foundation founder, Martin Canabal. Martin is driving the Pan American Highway and has a team filming a documentary on the adventurous road trip. I interviewed Martin for CleanTechnica earlier this summer just after he started his trip from Alaska. This is a follow-up to that interview.
When we spoke, Martin was in Mexico and we talked about some of his adventures along the way from Alaska to Mexico. The team is taking two Teslas down the Pan-American Highway, the world’s longest motorable road. Although it starts in Alaska and ends in Patagonia, there will be a portion of the trip where they have to ship the cars across the Darién Gap, an area where the highway does not exist due to political and environmental reasons.
So far, Martin and his teams have endured flat tires, bad roads, heavy rain, and Mexican speed bumps. Martin explained that the speed bumps in Mexico are extremely huge and that he has to modify the tow hitch due to the speed bumps.
“We have taken the cars to places that I didn’t think we could be able to take them on this trip,” he said. One of those places is Punta Abreojos, Baja California. a remote fishing village in the Pacific.
“We slept in off-the-grid cabins with solar power (so no charging!), no charging stations in town. We could barely charge in some homes using the 110/12A mobile charger. We had to change tires, and we had to wait some days for them to arrive, so we could not reach our next charging station. The tire shop had a welding machine, but we did not have the correct plug, so we had to improvise.”
Bahia de Todos los Ángeles was another place Martin and his team visited in Baja, California. He told me they drove off the main roads to see shark whales and barely made it back in time to charge.
“We thought we could charge for some hours, but the voltage of the town was not enough, so no charging at all!”
In Cabo Pulmo, the roads were so bad that Martin had a flat tire and the two cars had become separated. And the bad roads ended up damaging their tires.
“We used a tire fix and had to put air on the wheel using a bicycle pump from someone who stop to help us. We had an electric air pump but it was on the other car, that had to leave the day before to replace the other tires. After that, we made a rule: we will not drive separately! After all of this, we were able to get replacement tires, replacement wheels, and everything we needed to repair and replace the tires, but we also added more weight and this affects our range.”
The team had to change their schedule and timings of the trip to replace all of the tires for the Model X, which had also gotten a flat tire.
“It was a challenge. In the end, we were able to buy old tires and continue our trip to Cabo San Lucas where we bought new tires. This story ended in Guadalajara where we were able to go to Tesla Service and were able to change the other two tires.”
Another extreme place that Martin and his team visited is El Peñon, a paragliding spot near Valle de Bravo.
“You get there driving countryside roads, and dirt roads. But the place is majestic, and it is one of the best paragliding/Hang Gliding in the world!”
Martin’s last Tesla Service appointment took place in Mexico City where they looked at the cars to make sure that any repairs were done. After Mexico City, there will be no more Tesla Service Centers for the team as they continue along the Pan-American Highway.
“We have road service in Mexico but in a week after we leave the country, we won’t have any support from Tesla. That will be a challenge if something happens. We also had our last Tesla Supercharger in Puebla, Mexico.”
While Martin was chatting with me, his car was at a local Nissan dealership that had charging stations. As for charging along the rest of the trip, Martin was prepared to be creative.
The initial plan didn’t include charging stations past certain points, however, Martin emphasized that the EV charging landscape has changed and he’s seeing this along his trip.
“I planned this trip in 2020 and we’re supposed to charge between several days. There were no charging stations. Now we are in Puerto Escondido and we’re going to be here for four days. We have to film for the documentary and we have to charge. Normally it was going to be slow with no chargers.”
“Now, we can find chargers so our situation is much better now. I think things have improved a lot in two years. When I did my research, there was not a lot of charging stations for our route from Mexico to Argentina. And now I see more. And that’s incredible.”
“On the other hand, we were supposed to charge using the normal outlet. But we found out that this isn’t possible all the time. In several places, we tried to charge it and the Tesla didn’t charge because it sensed that the grid was not okay.”
Martin and the team expect that this will be a common occurrence for the rest of the trip. One unexpected surprise was that they didn’t have to pay for Supercharging in Mexico.
“Since Tesla isn’t able to charge for Supercharging in Mexico, hotels were incentivized for installing destination chargers which were great for us.”
Martin noted that soon, Tesla would be charging for Supercharging in Mexico but for his trip, however, he didn’t have to pay for Supercharging. He and the team also had hotel adventures. Some were expensive, some were reasonable, and some, he said with a laugh, were difficult to explain.
As Martin continues his journey across the Pan-American Highway, he plans to keep me updated on his progress. And when he does, I’ll be sure to share his stories here.
Your feedback is important. If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
Tesla has taken home the “Overall Loyalty to Make” award from S&P Global Mobility for the fourth consecutive year, reinforcing Tesla owners’ willingness to come back. The 2025 awards are based on S&P Global Mobility’s analysis of 13.6 million new retail vehicle registrations in the U.S. from October 2024 through September 2025. The complete list of 2025 winners includes General Motors for Overall Loyalty to Manufacturer, Tesla for Overall Loyalty to Make, Chevrolet Equinox for Overall Loyalty to Model, Mini for Most Improved Make Loyalty, Subaru for Overall Loyalty to Dealer, and Tesla again for both Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make and Highest Conquest Percentage.
Tesla’s streak in this category started in 2022, and the brand has now won the Highest Conquest Percentage award for six straight years, meaning it keeps pulling buyers away from other brands at a rate no competitor has matched. Tesla’s retention among Asian households reached 63.6% and among Hispanic households 61.9%, rates that significantly outpace national averages for those groups. That breadth of appeal across demographics adds a layer of significance to a win that some might dismiss as routine.
The timing matters too. After several consecutive quarters of decline, Tesla’s share of U.S. EV sales jumped to 59% in Q4 2025. That rebound, arriving just as competitors were flooding the market with new models and incentives, suggests Tesla’s loyalty numbers are not simply the result of limited alternatives. Buyers are still choosing it when they have plenty of other options.
What keeps Tesla owners coming back has a lot to do with the and convenience of charging. The Supercharger network is the most straightforward example. With over 65,000 Superchargers globally, it remains the largest and most reliable fast-charging network in the world, and owners who have built their routines around it face a real practical cost when considering a switch. Competitors have made progress, but the consistency, speed, and availability of Tesla’s network is still the benchmark the rest of the industry is chasing. Then there is the software side. Tesla has built a model where the car you own today is functionally different from the car you bought two years ago, through over-the-air updates that add continuous game-changing improvements such as Full Self-Driving that has moved from a driver-assist feature to an increasingly capable autonomous system. For many Tesla owners, leaving the brand means starting over with a car that will not get meaningfully better over time, and that is a trade-off fewer and fewer are willing to make.
Cybertruck
Tesla Cybercab just rolled through Miami inside a glass box
Tesla paraded a Cybercab in a glass display at Miami’s F1 Grand Prix event this week.
Tesla set up an “Autonomy Pop-Up” at Lummus Park in Miami Beach from April 29 through May 3, 2026, embedded within the official F1 Miami Grand Prix Fan Fest. The centerpiece was a Cybertruck towing the Cybercab inside a glass display case marked “Future is Autonomous,” rolling through the beachfront crowd.
Miami is on Tesla’s confirmed list of cities for robotaxi expansion in the first half of 2026, making the promotion a strategic promotion that lays groundwork in a target market.
This was not Tesla’s first time using Miami as a showcase city. In December 2025, Tesla hosted “The Future of Autonomy Visualized” at its Miami Design District showroom, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach. That event featured the Cybercab prototype and Optimus robots interacting with attendees. The F1 pop-up this week marks Tesla’s return to Miami and follows a pattern Tesla has been running since early 2026. Just two weeks before Miami, Tesla stationed Optimus at the Tesla Boston Boylston Street showroom on April 19 and 20, directly on the final stretch of the Boston Marathon, letting tens of thousands of runners and spectators meet the robot for free, generating massive earned media at zero advertising cost.
Tesla is sending its humanoid Optimus robot to the Boston Marathon
Tesla has confirmed plans to expand its robotaxi service to seven cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas, building on the unsupervised service already running in Austin. Musk has said he expects robotaxis to cover between a quarter and half of the United States by end of year. On the production side, Musk told shareholders that the Cybercab manufacturing process could eventually produce up to 5 million vehicles per year, targeting a cycle time of one unit every ten seconds. Scaling robotaxis to 10 million operational units over the next ten years is a key condition of his compensation package, alongside selling 20 million passenger vehicles.
As for the Cybercab’s price, Musk has said buyers will be able to purchase one for under $30,000, with an average operating cost around $0.20 per mile. Whether those numbers hold through full production remains to be seen.
Cybercab at F1 Fan Fest in Miami
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Lifestyle
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
California just gave police power to ticket driverless cars, including Tesla’s Cybercab fleet.
California DMV formally adopted new rules on April 29, 2026 that allow law enforcement to issue “notices of noncompliance”, or in other words ticket autonomous vehicle companies when their cars commit moving violations. The rules take effect July 1, 2026 and officially closes a regulatory gap that previously let driverless cars operate on public roads with nearly no traffic enforcement consequences.
Until now, state traffic laws only applied to human “drivers,” which meant that when no person was behind the wheel, police had no mechanism to issue a ticket. Officers were limited to citing driverless vehicles for parking violations only. A well-known example came in September 2025, when a San Bruno officer watched a Waymo robotaxi execute an illegal U-turn and could do nothing but notify the company.
Under the new framework, when an officer observes a violation, the autonomous vehicle company is effectively treated as the driver. Companies must report each incident to the DMV within 72 hours, or 24 hours if a collision is involved. Repeated violations can result in fleet size restrictions, operational suspensions, or full permit revocation. Local officials also gained new authority to geofence driverless vehicles out of active emergency zones within two minutes and require a live emergency response line answered within 30 seconds.
Tesla Cybercab ramps Robotaxi public street testing as vehicle enters mass production queue
California’s new enforcement rules arrive at a pivotal moment for Tesla. The company is ramping Cybercab production at Giga Texas toward hundreds of units per week, targeting at least 2 million units annually at full capacity, while simultaneously pushing to expand its Robotaxi service to dozens of U.S. cities by end of 2026. Unsupervised FSD for consumer vehicles is currently targeted for Q4 2026, and when it arrives, Tesla’s fleet may not have a human to absorb legal accountability, under the July 1 rules.
Tesla has confirmed plans to expand its Robotaxi service to seven new cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas, with the service already running without safety drivers in Austin. Musk has said he expects robotaxis to cover between a quarter and half of the United States by end of year.
Tesla owners keep coming back for more
Tesla Robotaxi service in Austin achieves monumental new accomplishment
