Lifestyle
When Tesla ideas go mainstream… again
There are times in life where you have a lightbulb moment, so to speak, where suddenly a new way of doing things seems obvious. A month doesn’t seem to go by where Tesla isn’t doing some form of that to the auto industry.
First, it was electric cars. Against all odds, Tesla has proven that electric cars can be beautiful, compelling, practical and fast, all at once.
Next, it was over the air updates. A car that gets better over time? Unfathomable. Same goes for their off-cycle upgrades. A car company that doesn’t work in model years? Absurd!
Then, in what’s probably the least likely of Tesla’s practices to be copied, it was not making parts and service a profit center. While traditional dealers make a majority of their profits from these areas, Tesla chooses not to. Insanity!
Tesla also built out their own refueling infrastructure. Making it free or low cost is just not something anyone ever pictured with regards to the auto industry. Outside of gimmicky “free gas for a year” promotions, it’s just unheard of.
There are many more: the effective use of social media, the refusal to pay for traditional advertising, not paying sales folks on commission, online ordering, built-to-order cars, up front pricing, and many more. All of these items on their own amount to mosquito bites on the bare skin of other automakers. This small, once thought insignificant start up from California had no chance in their deeply entrenched good ole’ boys club. Except, that’s just not true anymore. 250,000 reservation deposits in two days for a new car proves it. Tesla is here to stay and has changed the course of how other companies in the auto industry will have to operate to stay alive.
In fact, I got a surprising email from a major auto insurance company recently. The subject was “About those driver’s-assist features you love.” The content provided some great and practical advice to using them, reminding drivers to provide the brains and not to fall into the trap of say, failing to check your blind spot just because your car has blind spot detection. That advice however, wasn’t what I noticed first. “Tesla did this,” I thought to myself, before I even read the content of the email. Tesla has brought attention to the lightening-fast march of car technology so much so that a major insurer felt compelled to talk to customers about it.
Speaking of insurers, Tesla wants to go there too. Place another checkmark in the column of industries Tesla is stepping on the toes of. They can get in line behind ride-sharing giants, since Tesla has also mentioned ride sharing in their Master Plan Part 2. Which reminds me that the airline industry may also take a hit.
My personal favorite change, however, is the car dealership experience. The current model is obsolete. No matter how well prepared I was, how keen to their tricks, how adamantly against being sold an extended warranty, it still took me three whole hours to help a neighbor buy a car recently. It took at least that long to buy our last Jeep and longer than that to buy my first new car, a Scion. I just want to do some research, narrow down choices, go for a test drive, then buy a darn car. I don’t care if it takes weeks to get, as long as those weeks are spent at home doing my own thing and not sitting in an uncomfortable dealership filled with stale pretzels and fluorescent lighting. I don’t want to haggle. I especially don’t want my intelligence insulted by being shown monthly payment terms that hide the fact that your first offer was actually $9,000 over MSRP. (I’m talking to you, Jeep.) I have a calculator. Actually, I have a printed out spreadsheet that shows my monthly payments for 10 different price points and 3 different interest rates since I know you insist on negotiating in monthly payment terms rather than total purchase price. I’m a dealership’s worst nightmare. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Tesla proves it. Scion claimed they did – pure pricing they called it. I knew wherever I shopped, my 2008 tC was going to cost me exactly $18,400. It still took me all day to buy that car. Buying my Model S was a joy.
And now, a couple hundred thousand of my closest friends are about to experience that same joy. Actually, they may experience something better. Tesla appears to be trying to best themselves by providing a 5-minute delivery model. After all, Tesla doesn’t discriminate when it comes to who they show up when they decide they’ve found a better way, they just do it.
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.
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.
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! pic.twitter.com/TTrMql2aRg
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) June 17, 2026
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.
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.
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
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
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.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
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.
Tesla looks keen to bring larger Model Y L to the U.S.
One of Tesla’s biggest threats just got banned in the U.S.
