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Tesla Model 3 gets the LEGO fan treatment, complete with Sentry Mode

Model 3 design for LEGO Speed Championships, posted to LEGO Ideas. | Image: u/pfunkadunk (Reddit)

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7 years ago

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A Tesla Model 3 owner and enthusiast has taken up the cause of bringing the all-electric car maker’s latest vehicle to the LEGO Speed Champions playset series, specifically to represent a “nod to the world’s transition to sustainable energy and green energy innovation”. With enough community support, a brick version of the popular Model 3 could be available to purchase from stores in the future.

In a submission to the toy company’s LEGO Ideas fan community site, Reddit user pfunkadunk designed a very detailed black version of the midsize sedan, including the glass (clear) roof and touchscreen panels with swappable screens to represent features like Romance Mode and the now-removed TeslAtari game Pole Position. Updates to the LEGO Model 3 have been ongoing since its creation a few months ago, and the most recent version pays tribute to some popular Tesla exclusives: Sentry Mode and #frunkpuppy.

Great care was taken to present the LEGO Model 3 in a fashion as similar to a real gallery-floor-worthy Tesla as possible. Several close up shots were taken of the front, back, sides, and undercarriage of the toy car, and some “action” shots of a LEGO character using a brick-built Tesla Supercharger with the Model 3’s charging port were included. In one setup, a LEGO couple is even seen enjoying Romance Mode, the Tesla Easter Egg featuring a fireplace video with a corresponding music selection.

Along with detailed photos and video, the Model 3 set includes its own Supercharger, although we’re not sure whether it’s Version 3, boasting a 250 kW power output for charging at speeds of up to 1000 miles per hour. The hinged and operable frunk can also accommodate a LEGO canine, meaning the #frunkpuppy trend can now include residents from the brick-ish side of life. Perhaps future updates will include Tesla’s flush door handles, Power Sports Aero Wheels, and some enhancing decals.

LEGO’s Speed Champions series currently features classic and modern muscle cars, but only the Audi R18 E-Tron Quattro, a diesel-electric hybrid, and Porsche’s 919 Hybrid represent the lower emissions category of vehicles – for now. The Model 3 LEGO designer has set out to change that lineup to include an all-electric option, and given the performance stats and Track Mode features offered by the Tesla vehicle, its inclusion in the Speed Champions series is perhaps warranted. A website was put together to highlight the LEGO design project and further make the case for being part of the series.

The Model 3 LEGO design does contain some significant overall design differences from the actual car such as the steering wheel being centered. When compared to other cars in the Speed Champions series, though, it’s clear that the designer made the brick Model 3 in keeping with the design feel of the series overall. In comparison, the diecast collector cars offered in Tesla’s online shop are meticulously designed to replicate each one of its vehicles, but at $250 they may be cost prohibitive for a kid-oriented target audience. LEGO Speed Champions sets go for between $25 and $75 depending on the item.

If a LEGO designer obtains 10,000 supporters for their submission, the company will make it into an official toy for sale after a review.

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Accidental computer geek, fascinated by most history and the multiplanetary future on its way. Quite keen on the democratization of space. | It's pronounced day-sha, but I answer to almost any variation thereof.

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Lifestyle

Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

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3 days ago

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August 13, 2026

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

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Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

6 days ago

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August 10, 2026

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

Published

1 week ago

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August 7, 2026

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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