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The Apple in Tesla and how silly infotainment systems can be

Wouold Apple’s CarPlay be a better infotainment for the Model S?

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CarPlay
CarPlay

CarPlay

The more I look at Apple’s CarPlay, the more I like it. It’s simple, it’s brilliant and it’s everything Apple is supposed to be, innovative, but it’s not revolutionary. Apple created great products in the past, and CarPlay does something every manufacturer seem to stumble upon. By reinventing the wheel of what an infotainment system should be, it reflects what I already know.

Infotainment done right

As automotive journalists, we get to test drive a lot of cars. That usually means getting to know them, figuring out their quirks and finally seeing how well they the demands of their targeted clientèle. However, there is one thing I dislike intensely, learning a new infotainment system for every manufacturer as well as their numerous updates.

Smart cellphones and silly infotainment systems

On the positive side, Tesla Motors has one of the very best infotainment system around. It suffers little to no gripes – save for the learning curve it takes to familiarize yourself with it. So why don’t carmakers offer us the capacity to mirror what we are already familiar with onto our smartphones? All they need is a display, leaving the dash to show the relevant car information.

In Tesla’s case, that would be very, very easy. The Model S already offers a generous display powered by a more than capable Nvidia GPU, itself relying on yet another Nvidia GPU for the rest of the system. Since the screens can be split, why not offer the option to mirror your smart phone?

Apple got it

CarPlay

CarPlay

I also never understood why Apple sat on the sidelines while Ford used Windows for its infotainment system. Apple showed late at car shows in 2009. I told them it was about time and that there was a great need for simple interface. Apple’s CarPlay system fits the bill. It’s innovative, yet simple. All it really does is allow an iOS users to make voice calls, listen to their music collection, view maps, while receiving and sending messages through touch and voice activated controls. And yes, Apple’s famous, or infamous Siri, its voice activation assistant, is available at the touch of a button on the steering wheel.

No matter how great Apple is, there are drawbacks. Not every Model S driver has an iPhone, for one thing and even those with iPhones will need the newer 5 and 5S. This leaves a good proportion of IOS users unable to use CarPlay. This strategy will push Apple’s already hefty bottom line up, but it means if you are a Blackberry, an Android, or older iPhone user, you won’t be able to access the system. Make it backward compatible. After all, you’re mirroring IOS.

The solution?

Simple. Let us see what we’re used to when we step into a car. No one wants to have to learn a new system. We already have enough computers at home, running different operating systems, and don’t need yet another system vying for our attention. Please carmakers and software developers, simplify our lives.

And now, just when you think your connected life wasn’t convoluted enough, Google is rumored to be working on their very own infotainment system, while Microsoft is revealing its Windows in the Car concept. Really, do we need more Infosystems? How about showing me what I already know? Am I the only one feeling this way?

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Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory

Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.

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Tesla Cybertruck construction site

Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.

The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.

The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.

Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years

Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.

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Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.

In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.

The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.

Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.

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This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.

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Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip

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A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.

“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.

Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.

Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.

He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.

Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.

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The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.

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