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Scoring an Invite to the Model 3 Unveiling

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Tesla Model 3 unveiling lottery confirmation

For months I have been half joking about scoring an invite to the Model 3 unveiling event by becoming a “famous” YouTube star. In fact, I started wondering how I could pull this off before Tesla even announced details, and without knowing much about how Tesla handled invites for other events. When the D event was announced, our Model S was on order but I hadn’t yet experienced the buzz surrounding events as an official enthusiast. Most of this joking was made on the Forum section of the Tesla Motors website. In fact, on January 8th, this post was started, shouting into the void in case anyone from Tesla management was listening. A fellow forum user was cheering me on, despite none of us at the time really knowing how one would be able to be invited, outside of making 10 or more qualified sales in the second referral contest.

On March 15th, Tesla announced official details about the upcoming Model 3 unveiling event. It would be held at 7pm on March 31st in the Los Angeles area and be an ‘intimate’ event. To show appreciation to existing owners, a lottery system would be used to fill 650 of the fewer than 800 spaces available for the event.

As soon as the email inviting owners to register for the lottery came through, I urged my husband that we should do it. He worried what would happen if we actually got selected, and was convinced it would happen. We had plans to take off work and arrive at our local service center bright and early to make our reservation for a Model 3. I want nothing more than to get it as soon as possible to be rid of our second car – my ICE Hyundai – and planned to reserve as early as physically possible.

In the hours and day to follow, I started to get nervous. ‘What if we get selected?’ I thought. That would mean an unexpected trip, un-budgeted airfare, and missing the chance to reserve in store the minute it opens. I can’t say whether or not I officially regretted entering the lottery at that moment, but I knew that in the extremely unlikely event of getting selected, I’d have a lot of thinking to do.

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March 17th came and went without hearing anything. There was not yet any chatter about owners getting selected by the time I went to sleep on the East Coast and I assumed the word would come down overnight. By the time my alarm sounded at 6:30am, my better half was already nearly done his workout at the gym. He sent me this email, “Obviously we need to chat ….”

Yes, it happened. Just as he predicted it would, we got selected to attend the event. I squealed a little. I jumped out of bed. I ran right to my computer and for reasons unbeknownst to me at this moment, I posted a video of my face sharing in the excitement.

 

I texted my husband the words “Yes, yes, yes!”  I started searching flights. To be honest I had already searched flights and saved an itinerary two days prior which would get us a direct flight at a semi-reasonable price. Back in January, I took first place in one of my fantasy football leagues. $281 in winnings were set aside “just in case” I had a plane ticket to buy in late March. This was supposed to be the week I spent it on something stupid, since by now I’d know that there was no chance I would be at the Model 3 event.

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$860. Each. That was the price of the exact flight that was only five-something two days earlier. No way that was going to work. I started to realize that in the few times I had searched flights for the day, anything under $600 was pretty rare, unfortunately. Flights are meant to be booked well in advance and we just didn’t have that luxury.

Maybe we should drive to LA. Shoot, I’m going to be late for work. I drove the whole way with my head buzzing trying to figure out how best to get my butt to LA in two weeks. “We’re still young, we can do this”, I thought. It’s probably only two days of driving. Per the EV Trip Planner, it’s 55 hours each way. Wait, that’s not going to work. There were only 24 hours in a day last time I checked, and we’d need to sleep. (I googled a notable EV cross country trip and realized they had three drivers, took turns sleeping, and had more backup drivers following in an ICE. It took meticulous planning.)

For a few hours I took a mental break. Little did I know the Mister was at searching flights. Once he told me about one he found, a feeling of urgency started setting in. My tone got a bit frantic and I ended up booking before he could give me his blessing.

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Breathe. We’re going. What’s $1056 at a time like this? This is the beauty (downfall?) of credit cards, I don’t really have to think about it until the due date next month. In my mind tens of thousands of owners signed up for a chance to be at this event and passing up on an RSVP (that we volunteered for) wasn’t an option.

What about my plans to reserve in store at the first possible moment? I’ll be in the air. There are no scenarios where I can be at a store (even one in California) anywhere near the first hour. I called my local service center and asked for someone in sales to call me back.

“I understand you have a question about reserving a Model 3.”

“I promise you won’t have gotten this question from anyone yet. Wanna bet? No, that’s stupid, let me just tell you… I planned on coming by and waiting around, maybe bringing coffee and donuts to hang out with you guys and place my deposit at the first possible moment. But I can’t. I’ll be in the air. On my way to Hawthorne!” 

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A very pleasant and supportive voice congratulated me. He reminded me that owners would be prioritized over non-owners. I told him of my crazy theory that even reserving at the event, 9 hours after in-store reservations started, could mean 6 months or more of production wait. He chuckled and mentioned getting roughly 15 visits or phone calls every day last week asking about reserving. And that’s in Pennsylvania, where only a previous few EV owners live.

Reservation worries aside, I’m pretty pumped about the event. Do you have any speculation about what to expect? Or for that matter, what the dress code will be? Let me know in the comments section!

See recent posts from Electric Jen.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville

The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.

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The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”

MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.

Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.

It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.

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Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.

With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.

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Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”

Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.

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Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.

While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure

The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.

Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet

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Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.

Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.

As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.

Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.

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Elon Musk

SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app

SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.

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SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.

Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.

Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.


Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.

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Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”

Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.

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