Connect with us

Lifestyle

Top luxury automakers follow Tesla’s lead, others are in denial

Source: Tesla

Published

on

Once seen as the domain of tech geeks and tree huggers, electric cars have transformed into the new, must-have accessory for the rich and famous. “When marketing luxury vehicles, ‘electric’ is no longer a bad word… feeling good about your car is the new feeling cool about your car,” says Bloomberg.

It’s reported, “We take it for granted that a fair number of wealthy car buyers admire electric power, thanks to the cool cachet of Tesla Inc. But not long ago, electrics were viewed as anathema by serious car people.” Not anymore. According to Milton Pedraza, founder of the Luxury Institute, “It is definitely high-performance with sustainability that resonates… with affluent and wealthy automotive buyers.”

Tesla may be the industry pioneer, but other luxury automakers are looking to get in on the action. Take a posh (albeit stodgy) brand like Bentley. The company’s CEO Adrian Hallmark explains, “There is a new dimension long-term in the purchase decision—the ethical value,” he says, referring to gleanings from an internal study Bentley did of the world’s wealthiest people. “Electrification is part of it, and electrification isn’t going away.”

Advertisement

Above: Last year, Bentley introduced their first all-electric concept car (Youtube: CNN Money)

Unlike before, being green is, “spurring the world’s millionaires and billionaires to make luxury purchases, based on a system of values such as reduced carbon footprints and sustainability… According to Hallmark, hybrid and electric cars allow them to express [themselves] in a novel way.”

And Bentley is taking action — consider this: “By 2025, all Bentley cars will offer some version of an electric drivetrain.” Hallmark elaborates, “We already know that the [next Bentley] will be a battery electric vehicle,” he says. “It will have all of those moral and ethical benefits with it. By not going that way, even if we don’t have to, we would be massively under-performing in terms of customer potential.”

Bloomberg also cites the Porsche Mission-E and Aston Martin Lagonda as other examples of marquis all-electric concept cars coming (someday) from luxury automakers. However, not all luxe car brands are believers. Bugatti’s Stephan Winkelmann said “it’s too early to talk about” electrification. Still, he hedges his bets affirming that “it’s something to look into.”

Advertisement

Others are more dismissive. McLaren’s Jolyon Nash said, “Until the technology develops sufficiently for both power and range, I think it would be hard to have an exciting supercar that is pure electric.” And, “Lamborghini SpA’s chief engineer, Maurizio Reggiani, says it would take quite a lot of persuasion—maybe an act of God—for the brand to make anything electric in the near future.”

Nevertheless, Stephanie Brinley, senior analyst for IHS Markit, forecasts a bright future for vehicle electrification. She acknowledges, “If you look at millennials or the younger generation, there does seem to be more thoughtfulness about what kind of mark you leave on the planet—more so than a decade ago. As we move forward in the luxury landscape, for this type of buyer, having one in your garage will be crucial.”

===

Note: Article originally published on evannex.com by Matt Pressman; Source: Bloomberg

Advertisement

EVANNEX carries aftermarket accessories, parts, and gear for Tesla owners. Its blog is updated daily with Tesla news.

Advertisement
Comments

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.

Published

on

By

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

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

Continue Reading

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.

Published

on

By

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

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.

Published

on

By

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.

Advertisement

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

Continue Reading