Lifestyle
Heavy rains at CES 2018 highlights self-driving technology limitations
At the Consumer Electronics Show annual showcase of technology in Las Vegas this year, something important was inadvertently highlighted. Inclement weather at CES 2018 caused several manufacturers and suppliers to cancel or significantly alter their autonomous vehicle showcases. Nissan, for example, discontinued showings of its new ProPilot technology in the 2019 Nissan LEAF electric car (demos of the LEAF otherwise continued). Other manufacturers embraced the chance to show some of their latest capabilities.
Decisions to cancel seemed based more on liability, both physical (“What if something goes wrong?”) and intangible (“If it doesn’t work, we lose face.”), than on likely limitations of the manufacturer’s technologies. Those pressing forward or even using the weather as a way to showcase capabilities were mostly smaller, less branded companies whose reputations to the public would suffer only short-term losses were things to go awry.
It literally hasn't rained in 118 days in Las Vegas. Until today. Guess we can't use this road 👀 pic.twitter.com/5sjVKDEx00
— Marques Brownlee (@MKBHD) January 10, 2018
Semi-Autonomous Systems in General
To understand why bad weather can be such a detriment to current-use and near-future autonomous vehicles we must first understand how these systems work. Most semi-autonomous systems on the road are based on a combination of three technologies, all coupled to semi-intelligent computers. These techs are radar, LiDAR, and cameras. Radar uses radio waves, LiDAR uses lasers to find ranges, and cameras use varied spectrums of light to create images for a computer to decode.
Tesla’s Autopilot uses radar and cameras to get a view of the world around the vehicle. Subaru’s EyeSight system uses cameras only, seeing ahead of the car in three dimensions, but thus far not seeing in 360-degrees. Ford’s current systems use combinations of radar, light-detection and ranging (LiDar), and cameras to see the world around the vehicle. Nissan uses radar and LiDar in the same way. General Motors, BMW, and others all use variations on these themes for their own production-level semi-autonomous systems.
The majority of these manufacturers are also either utilizing or working on utilizing GPS and mapping to augment what the vehicle’s computer systems know about the world around it. Tesla’s Autopilot uses GPS, at least in North America, to sense where the vehicle is. Including (whenever possible) which lane of the road it occupies and when the road will change (to see curves and terrain). Using GPS and mapping is much easier in North America than it is in Europe and China, where its use is more restricted.
When Weather Turns Bad
Yet with all of these technologies, there are still limitations.LiDAR does not work when the sensors are in any way blocked, such as with rain droplets or ice. Radar is often distorted by ice as well. Cameras cannot function if a clear enough image cannot be received for analysis by the computers. Thus it’s possible for all three sensing technologies to become useless when the weather is sub-optimal.
For those living in South Florida and San Diego, these are probably not anything to worry about. For the rest of the planet, though, they are a concern for a good portion of the year. Where I live in Wyoming, for example, inclement weather affects driving for about half of the year. In some parts of the world, such as Iceland, Norway, Russia, and much of Canada, the weather is sub-optimal for half the year or more. The same can be said when turning southward to the other hemisphere, especially in South America.
When visibility is low, humans compensate by making best guesses about what’s around them. We can use other cues to find our vehicle’s lane in traffic during heavy snow, for example, by relying on curbs, the tracks of cars that have gone ahead, and known landmarks. Just as we use non-visual cues such as input from the pedals and the steering wheel to know how slippery the roadway is so we can adjust speed and reactions accordingly. We do most of this subconsciously.
Computers, however, are not always that capable. They’re getting there, though. Ford has been busy creating high-resolution maps of the roadways around the world, with details such as the exact position of curbs and lane lines, where trees and signs are located, and what traffic rules are in place (speed limits and the like). The idea being that the better the knowledge the vehicle’s computers have of a given area, the more capable that vehicle will be of navigating that area without a driver’s input.
Ford says that it’s latest-generation autonomous vehicle technologies can now drive with full, unplowed snow cover blocking all lane markings and most road signs. That is confined to Ford’s Mcity, a fake town the company built to test autonomous driving. After all, Ford is a huge company and has a lot to lose should there be a fault with its systems when used out in public.
Tesla, for their part, has largely used Telsa owners as their primary test bed. So far, that’s worked for them, but it carries a very large liability should something go wrong. Most automakers are not willing to take that kind of risk and are instead developing carefully and in-house.
How Semi-Autonomous Is Doing Now
As an automotive journalist, I drive a lot of vehicles. I had more than 80 of them as test vehicles for a week or more in 2017 and more than that in 2016. This year, I will likely see at least that many or more. Plus “butt in seat,” track, and off-road events and shows where more short-term driving takes place. My experience includes vehicles with no autonomous or “driver-assist” technologies at all (e.g. Alfa Romeo 4C) and vehicles with full-on level 3 and even 4 technologies (e.g. BMW plug-ins, 2017 Tesla S). The field of currently-offered technologies for semi-autonomous driving is wide, indeed, but none of these systems are truly autonomous and most are fairly limited in use. They’re improving, but it’s gonna be a while.
With an autonomous vehicle, as Carlos Ghosn (former Nissan CEO, now CEO of Renault and Mitsubishi) said a couple of years ago during a meet the press event in Detroit, “a two-ton vehicle is a little different than a smartphone.” There’s a little more at stake with a car, in terms of safety concerns, than there is with a phone.
Credit: Now You Know via YouTube
My personal experience has been that camera-based systems are the best when conditions are good. Subaru’s EyeSight may be the most reliable and useful of the forward-looking driver-assistance systems on the market right now. But when heavy rains or worse come, it’s all but useless. Enter Nissan’s current technologies, as found on the Murano and in much of the Infiniti line. This system adds radar and can “look under” traffic to see several vehicles ahead. Much better, but still unable to find a lane in bad weather when markings are unclear. Ford, as far as in-production technology, fares about the same, but with a somewhat less over-reactive adaptive cruise control. BMW has similar limits but has some of the best self-parking I’ve witnessed so far. Tesla has one of the best systems, especially in the current-generation with its defrosting cameras and the like. The best all-around mixture of capability, though, is what’s found in the latest Volvo vehicles. Likely due to the kind of redundancy that Volvo is so well known for when it comes to safety equipment.
With this, Tesla should be noted for their proactive nature when it comes to pushing new technologies like Autopilot and its myriad upgrades since inception. How Autopilot reacted to heavy snow in Iceland two years ago compared to how it fares almost two years later is indicative of that. The same car cannot necessarily navigate that same road under those same conditions, but it will likely hold on longer than it did and would likely be able to pull over to safety should the driver not take action on his own.
In short, we have some time before autonomous vehicles are both a reality and capable of handling the many varied conditions that humans have adapted our driving to. But with the current pace of development, vehicles capable of moving through nearly any kind of weather will be available within the next decade.
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.
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.
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