Lifestyle
A road trip without Tesla Autopilot is akin to torture
I’ve recently returned from a family beach vacation that required about 600 miles of road travel. As an avid enthusiast and follower of the developments of Tesla, I am very aware of Autopilot’s capabilities and limitations and I hope it is one of the last times I have to cover such distance without its assistance. At the time of this writing, the current abilities of the system would have made the drive immeasurably better. 600 miles may not seem like a huge journey to some people, but compared to my regular travel diet, it may as well have been a million.
Let me set the tone. It has become an annual tradition for my in-laws to invite my family along to their beach vacation. The travel portion alone is a 1-2 day micro-convoy, typically lead by the father-in-law. Starting around Hershey, Pennsylvania, and enduring a passive Civil War history lesson on our way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It always amazes me how regional diction can vary so much with a slight change in latitude. The normal traffic volume obstacles generally steal years from your life around Washington DC and Richmond, Virgina if you choose to take the I-95 straight shot down. Stopped traffic with no exit in sight is not a good match for our tiny-bladdered precious cargo. Therefore, we take the long way around and hope for thinner crowds.
In my younger years, before children, corrective lenses and normal bodily wear and tear, I would go as far to say that I enjoyed the long drive. My undivided attention to the road and surroundings must have added a layer of control and ease that I no longer feel. Now I am responsible for more lives. Ironically, the same lives that I am constantly trying to protect are also unintentionally adding sensory distractions, exponentially diluting the focus that needs to be dedicated to the road.
“Holding onto the wheel as you generally progress in a straight line forward seems more akin to torture.”
I still enjoy driving, but I hardly consider highway travel to be true driving. Holding onto the wheel as you generally progress in a straight line forward seems more akin to torture. Winding local roads that provide constant stimulation and driving dynamics are much more enjoyable. I’m not sure what the statistics would say, but I am a safer, more alert, driver on roads like this.
While the task of following the leader may seem incredibly simple on the surface, a deeper evaluation reveals why the assistance of Autopilot would excel in all the areas that a human might struggle. Attention, fatigue, refined control, and response time are common weaknesses that every person has to some extent. This type of driving can be quite dangerous, and it’s important to not lose respect for that.
It is extremely difficult to devote complete attention to the road for the entirety of 600 miles. There is a pretty good chance that most drivers will find themselves looking around occasionally. We passed a couple of crashes along the way and observed a few near misses from people rubbernecking. Even if you had unbroken focus, unexpected events can happen during a quick blind-spot check.
Autopilot cannot see infinitely in all directions, but it is still able to constantly maintain its views in normal traffic. It won’t look away for a moment. As a machine, it’s programmed to perform its given task and cannot be distracted or break focus.
Fatigue is a very real risk that grows more dangerous with every mile. It can seemingly creep up and at any moment. While it helps to have company in the vehicle, if conversation wanes, things can get dicey.
Again, Autopilot cannot grow tired over time. There is no way that it can fall asleep.
I think it is safe to assume that nearly everyone has wandered onto the rumble strips on the edge of the lane at some point – often causing a slight overreaction to correct. Or maybe you just seem to drift along within your lane, visiting each side from time to time. I have to admit, despite my acknowledgment of drifting, it sometimes seems that a conscious effort to correct it is temporarily not effective. I don’t want to quickly veer back into alignment in a big action that would seem like I lost control or attention, but my attempts to make a slow move back to the middle of the lane are not working. Can I blame the car or the road for this? Perhaps it’s the trend of the car in front of me and my mental ‘autopilot’ is just following the same path. Maybe I’m being hypnotized and lured in by the rhythmic dashed lines sweeping by. Whatever the cause, soon the neighboring semi’s graceful forward stampede gets a bit too close for comfort and I snap out of it as my heart goes into momentary adrenaline mode. A good anxiety recipe for the travelers around me. It is important for people like me to admit that we are crappy drivers. At least I’m not the moron that is too lazy to flick the turn signal wand for lane shifts.
As Autopilot matures, so does its ability to stay centered within a lane. As soon as I get assistance from Autopilot, the road and people around me will become that much safer. Like a train fixed to a track, it can’t be hypnotized or anxious through my own or neighboring human error. And it certainly will not shift from one to another without the driver initiating via a signal.
Among the most important benefits of Autopilot has to be the response time. The scenario that comes to mind is sudden deceleration events. Maybe your eyes are focused on a roadside sight or the neighboring lane when the vehicle in front of yours begins to slow. Even if you catch it in time to slow before a collision, a sudden slowing of your own vehicle reduces the reaction time for the drivers behind you. It gets exponentially more dangerous for a driver to the rear and often ends in contact. Reaction time circles back to the fact that autopilot is always paying attention.
My travels would have been far less stressful if I had the aid of Autopilot. The closest experience I had to an Autopilot environment took place while I was in the passenger seat while my wife drove. I was able to take in some truly breathtaking views that I may have missed if I were safely focused on traffic. Who knew that the Virginian Appalachian mountains were so beautiful? A scenic overlook that could easily be missed since the highway wound around bends in a clearing.
Full autonomy will be the ultimate protection against me and my driving tendencies. For now, the beta Autopilot can serve as the perfect supplement to my inadequacies.
Not to undersell the importance of safety, but I want to be able to enjoy a long road trip again. I want to feel comfortable enough to pry just one hand off the wheel so that I can annihilate a can of Pringles while the kids are too engrossed in Finding Nemo to notice I should have shared. I want to feel like I’m no longer terrorizing my wife and the drivers around me with my inexplicable tendency to grind and ping pong the edges of my lane.
I fantasize about this incredible sense of ease that Autopilot would add to a trip of this sort. The desire for more frequent and further road trips may find welcome. Road travel once defined an era of adventure and exploration. It powered local tourism and small business economies. Before highways became monsters and gas pumps robbed us of our planet’s future in addition to hard-earn money, there was a sense of unbound geographical freedom. It sparked the imagination of the children in the back seat while giving adults conquered goals. I want that. I need that. I need Autopilot.
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.
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.
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.
Lifestyle
Tesla saves its passengers again – This time after a 300-foot cliff fall in Malibu
A Tesla Model 3 fell 300 feet off a Malibu cliff and both passengers survived.
A Tesla Model 3 plunged roughly 300 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Highway in Malibu on Friday morning, May 29, 2026, and both occupants survived. The crash was reported at approximately 7:30 a.m. near the 2500 block of Mulholland Highway, triggering a multi-agency rescue operation involving Malibu Search and Rescue, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and McCormick Ambulance.
When first responders arrived, the male driver was outside the vehicle shouting for help while the female passenger remained pinned inside the Tesla. Rescue crews rappelled down the cliffside on ropes to reach the wreckage. A flight medic was lowered by helicopter to begin treating both victims, and the driver was hoisted up to the roadway before crews used the Jaws of Life to free the trapped passenger. Both were airlifted to a local trauma center with moderate injuries despite a remarkable result for a fall that steep.
The outcome is not surprising, considering Model 3 earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA in every category and sub-category, and recorded the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program. The absence of a traditional engine in the front of the vehicle creates a longer crumple zone that absorbs impact energy before it reaches occupants, and the battery pack running along the floor gives the car an unusually low center of gravity that reinforces structural rigidity.
This is not the first time a Tesla has kept passengers alive after going off a cliff. A Tesla Model Y carrying a family of four survived a plunge off a cliff at Devil’s Slide near San Francisco in January 2023, with two adults and two children walking away from a 250-foot fall. That incident drew widespread attention to how the structural integrity of Tesla’s electric platform performs in extreme crash scenarios that most vehicles would not survive.
Tesla Model Y driver who drove off cliff with family attempts to avoid criminal conviction
Elon Musk
NASA’s first human outpost on the Moon starts now – SpaceX on deck
NASA named the rovers, landers, and vendors that will build America’s first Moon Base.
NASA has laid out its most detailed Moon Base plan to date, describing a permanent outpost near the Moon’s south pole that the agency intends to build over the coming decade as a direct stepping stone to Mars. “The Moon Base will be America’s and humanity’s first outpost on another celestial world,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, adding that every mission crewed and uncrewed “will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable.”
The plan is structured in three phases involving both uncrewed and crewed missions to deliver equipment, vehicles, and infrastructure to the surface, with the first three moon base missions targeted to launch before the end of 2026.
Moon Base I, targeting fall 2026, will use Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to deliver scientific instruments to the Shackleton Connecting Ridge, the same region where Artemis astronauts will land. Moon Base II will send Astrobotic’s Griffin lander carrying more than 1,100 pounds of cargo including Astrolab’s FLIP rover to begin developing mobility systems on the surface. Moon Base III will carry the Lunar Vertex science mission on Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C Trinity lander to study lunar swirls near the south pole, with ESA and Korean science payloads aboard.
On the rover side, NASA awarded Astrolab $219 million and Lunar Outpost $220 million to build the first phase of Lunar Terrain Vehicles, with both rovers targeted for deployment to the lunar surface by 2028. Astrolab’s crewed rover weighs roughly 2,000 pounds and can reach over 6 mph. Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus rover can operate autonomously or via remote control at over 9 mph. Blue Origin separately received $188 million with an option worth $280.4 million to deliver cargo landers for rover transport.
NASA also confirmed that MoonFall, a mission deploying four survey drones to scout Artemis landing sites, has selected Firefly Aerospace to build the transport spacecraft, with a 2028 launch target.
SpaceX sits at the center of that commercial layer. SpaceX holds the NASA Human Landing System contract for the Starship-derived lander that will put astronauts on the surface under Artemis IV, currently targeting 2028. Before that can happen, SpaceX must demonstrate in-orbit propellant transfer at scale, a process requiring multiple Starship tanker launches to fuel a single mission. Water ice at the lunar south pole is central to the base’s long-term viability, as it can be converted into drinking water, breathable oxygen, and rocket fuel, directly reducing dependence on Earth resupply. That resource loop becomes far more practical if Starship can land and be refueled on or near the Moon itself.
Elon Musk has publicly stated that Starship V3, which recently completed its first flight, should be capable enough for initial Mars missions. The Moon Base plan announced Tuesday is the infrastructure layer that connects everything between those two ambitions, and SpaceX is the only American company currently contracted to build the rocket that gets humans to either destination.
SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app
Tesla piggybacks recent Supercharger feature with update that takes it further
