Lifestyle
Around the world in 80 Days in a Tesla Model S
On June 15, Alan Soule of Sebastopol, California left Barcelona, Spain in his 2012 Tesla Model S. Over the next 80 days, he will travel more than 15,534 miles through 20 countries and across North America, Asia, and Europe before arriving back in Barcelona on September 4.
Soule is part of an event called 80dDays designed to demonstrate that electric cars can be used to travel long distances sustainably. In all, drivers from 7 countries — Switzerland, Germany, China, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Austria, and the US — are entered in the event.
The route will cross the Alps and the Rockies, traverse the Gobi desert, and visit many of the world’s major cities before ending back where it started. If all goes as planned, all 11 teams will drive together through the Arco de Triunfo in Barcelona 80 days after their journey began.
Soule, a 66 year old retired commercial building contractor, has been planning his journey for more than a year. “I have always been interested in alternative energy for vehicles,” he said. “I had a car that ran on propane back in the ’70s, and then when General Motors came out with the EV1, I leased one of those, and that was in 1999.”
He purchased a Tesla Roadster when they were first introduced in 2008 and took it on a trip down Route 66 in 2012. “From all the research that I’ve done, I’m almost positive it’s the first electric vehicle to drive Route 66,” he said. That same year, he bought his Model S.
One day at the Tesla Service Center in Menlo Park, California, he met Rafael de Mestre. The Spaniard was attempting to drive his Tesla Roadster around the world in 80 days. He failed in his quest but the two men kept in contact. When de Mestre mentioned the 80eDays event, Soule decided he and his Model S would join the fun.
Preparing for the trip has been a full-time job, Soule says. Obtaining visas from China, Kazakhstan, and Russia took quite a lot of time, as did planning the route they would take. “I originally wanted to go through Turkey because I like Turkey, but there are problems there,” Soule says.
“And I’ve been told that Belarus has a lot of gangs. And the southeastern portion of Ukraine is where the Russians are trying to make a stronghold. But if you go up through Latvia, that’s an extra 600 miles, and we don’t want to do that, so we’re going to take a chance and go through northern Ukraine and see what happens.”
The route from Barcelona leads southwest to Lisbon, Portugal, where the teams have chartered a plane to take their cars to Halifax, Nova Scotia. From there, they head west to New York, Chicago, and Denver. After making their way to Los Angeles, they will again go by plane to the southeastern edge of China in Guangzhou. From there, they will continue their journey west across Asia and Europe before arriving back in Barcelona.
Soule has lined up a rotating crew of five co-drivers who are friends and friends of friends. They will meet him and his Model S at various places along the route. To help people follow his journey, set up a Twitter account, Periscope, and a team website. His car is equipped with a 360 degree camera which he will use to upload video as he travels.
Photo courtesy of Alan Soule
Lifestyle
Tesla makes the cut on California’s newest EV Rebate program
California just signed a $270 million EV rebate into law and it starts this summer.
California Governor Gavin Newsom signed SB 168 into law on Monday, July 13, 2026, creating a $270 million EV rebate program that delivers money directly at the dealership rather than as a tax credit applied months later. The program, called MyFirstEV, is funded equally by California’s state budget and participating automakers, with each contributing $135.5 million to make the math work.
The timing is directly tied to the loss of federal support when the $7,500 federal EV tax credit ended, removing the most significant consumer incentive that had driven EV adoption in the U.S. California, which accounts for roughly one-third of all EVs sold nationally, moved to fill that gap with a state-level replacement.
The rebate structure is straightforward. First-time EV buyers can receive $3,500 off any new battery-electric vehicle with an MSRP up to $50,000. Used EVs priced at $25,000 or below qualify for a $1,750 rebate. The credit is applied at the point of sale, which removes the friction of the old federal system where buyers had to wait for tax season to see the benefit. The program goes live later this summer, with the California Air Resources Board expected to release full participation details next month.
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
For Tesla buyers, the implications are mixed. The Tesla Model 3 RWD at $42,490 and the Model 3 Long Range at $47,490 both fall under the $50,000 cap and would qualify for the full $3,500 rebate for first-time buyers. The Model Y, which starts at $44,990 after Tesla’s recent price adjustment, also qualifies. The Model X, Model S, and Cybertruck all exceed the cap and receive no benefit. As Teslarati has reported, the program also includes a carve-out exempting California-based automakers like Rivian and Lucid from the price cap entirely, a provision that puts Tesla at a disadvantage since it relocated its headquarters to Texas in 2021.
Other qualifying vehicles include the Chevrolet Equinox EV, Ford Mustang Mach-E, Hyundai Ioniq 5, Kia EV6, and Volkswagen ID.4.
Elon Musk
Tesla FSD is about to know your specific house and neighborhood better than any map
Tesla confirmed it is building a feature that lets you teach your car where to go.
Tesla is building a feature that will let drivers talk to their car in plain language and teach it exactly what to do, with the vehicle remembering those instructions for every future trip. Tesla VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy confirmed it this week on X after a user pointed out one of FSD’s most persistent real-world limitations is that the system has no way to receive contextual instructions the way a human driver would.
“FSD would be twice as useful in neighborhoods if I could actually talk to the car and tell it which driveway to pull into, the same way I would with a person driving me home. Right now, there isn’t really an input for telling Tesla what color the house is or giving it specific context like that. Google Maps is also notorious for putting pins on houses that aren’t actually yours.” Tesla owner Chris further noted, “It would be so cool if I could talk to the car while going down my street and say something like, ‘It’s the white house on the left, just past that SUV,’ and then have FSD remember that for next time.”
FSD would be twice as useful in neighborhoods if I could actually talk to the car and tell it which driveway to pull into, the same way I would with a person driving me home.
Right now, there isn’t really an input for telling Tesla what color the house is or giving it specific…
— Chris (@ChrissGPT) July 8, 2026
This feature would carry more weight than it might seem. Grok has been available inside Tesla vehicles since July 2025, expanded to European vehicles in February 2026, and gained a hands-free “Hey Grok” wake word with location-based reminders and natural-language navigation in the Spring 2026 update. But up to this point, Grok has had no authority over how FSD actually drives. Lane changes, braking, speed, and parking maneuvers remain entirely within FSD’s autonomous decision-making loop. What Elluswamy confirmed is that the next step pushes Grok into a supervisor role, one that translates spoken intent directly into driving decisions.
Tesla teases greater Grok FSD integration and ‘Banish’ feature ‘in about 3 months’
Elluswamy acknowledged at a January 2026 conference that while fully integrated voice control is on Tesla’s roadmap, “it opens up an entire area of testing that we have to do. For example, you shouldn’t be able to tell the car to crash, and it shouldn’t crash.” Elon Musk subsequently confirmed on June 23 that Grok voice commands will pass to FSD’s planning layer by September 2026, a three month timeline from confirmation to deployment.
The deeper significance is what this does for Tesla’s AI training flywheel. Every time an owner corrects FSD with a spoken instruction and the car learns and remembers it, that interaction becomes a data point covering an edge case that no simulation or scripted test could have generated. A fleet of millions of Tesla vehicles crowdsourcing hyper-local contextual knowledge, which driveway, which gate entrance, which side of the street, builds a layer of geographic and behavioral intelligence that competitors without a comparable fleet simply cannot replicate at the same speed or scale.
As Teslarati has reported, Tesla’s Cybercab and robotaxi operations have expanded to Miami following the Austin launch, with rider profiles already collecting preference data. Voice-taught contextual instructions linked to individual rider profiles means a Cybercab could eventually know before it arrives exactly which entrance to use, where to wait, and how to navigate the final hundred feet of any trip it has made before.
Lifestyle
Tesla app update makes Robotaxi ownership make a lot more sense
Tesla’s app now shows a live indicator when your car is actively driving itself.
A recent Tesla app update, released last week (4.58.5), gives visibility on whether a vehicle is navigating in its semi-autonomous mode or being driven by a human driver. The updated app now displays a live “Self-Driving” indicator in bright blue text directly beneath the vehicle’s speed readout whenever Full Self-Driving is actively engaged, along with the signature glowing blue navigation path that FSD users see on the main touchscreen. It is a small visual update with meaningful implications for how Tesla owners monitor their vehicles remotely.
The feature was first spotted in the wild by X user Jordan Camina, who shared video of a Hardware 3 Model S displaying the new animation through the app while driving. That detail is significant because it confirms the update is not limited to newer HW4 vehicles. It works across hardware generations, and Tesla confirmed it will eventually support all vehicles regardless of chip platform once both the app and vehicle software are updated. The vehicle side requires software version 2026.20.6.1, which has reached nearly 40% of the fleet so far, as monitored by NotaTeslaApp.
The feature makes the most practical sense when viewed through the lens of Tesla’s expanding robotaxi operation. In a robotaxi context, the owner of a vehicle generating ride revenue has a direct financial and safety interest in knowing whether their car is operating under autonomous control at any given moment. The app’s new FSD indicator gives fleet owners exactly that visibility, the same way a logistics company monitors whether a delivery driver is following the planned route. It also carries implications for Tesla’s insurance model. Tesla’s own insurance product prices premiums in part based on FSD engagement rates, and real-time visibility into when FSD is active creates a feedback loop that could eventually tie directly into policy pricing. For individual owners who have opted their personal vehicles into the robotaxi network, the update effectively turns the Tesla app into a fleet management dashboard, one that tells you whether your car is earning money, whether it is driving itself to do it, and whether everything is operating the way it should from wherever you happen to be.
Tesla expands Robotaxi to Florida, marking its third state for autonomy
As Teslarati has reported, Tesla launched unsupervised robotaxi rides in Miami this summer, a milestone that makes a remote FSD status indicator significantly more practical than a cosmetic feature. When a vehicle is operating as a robotaxi without a driver present, the owner or fleet operator needs a reliable way to confirm autonomy is engaged. The app now provides exactly that.
As noted by NotATeslaApp, The update also arrived alongside a hint buried in the same app version that Tesla plans to use the cabin camera to verify driver identity before FSD can be activated. Pairing identity verification with a live autonomy status indicator points toward the infrastructure Tesla is building for a fleet of driverless vehicles that owners can monitor the way you would track a package delivery.
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