Lifestyle
The Ultimate Tesla Model S Autocross Enduro Race
5 laps of pure adrenaline – Tires and brakes cooking, power limiter kicking in – just a final push to the finish line and…breath again!
Enduro racing, when autocross just isn’t enough. How about 5 continuous laps of autocross? Do you want to see when your car starts to overheat the tires go gooey and brakes begin fading? Experience it all in Enduro!
RELATED: Autocross in a Tesla Model S
There have been complaints about power limitation when tracking a Model S. During the typical ~1 min autocross course the car will not become power limited no matter how hard you punish it. The tires just barely get warm and brakes keep tight, no worries about overheating. A 5 lap Enduro is a different beast entirely. Turbos break, hoses rupture, I have seen brakes glowing and smelled the death scents of tortured ICE cars. This is the Kart Track at the Jackson County Sports Park in southern Oregon and the last autocross event of the year put on by the Siskiyou Sports Car Club (SSCC) is the Fall Enduro.
Jackson County Sports Park- Kart Track
This event is a clockwise 5 lap race around the outside of the track, roughly 3.3 miles total. The ‘grid’ where cars line up to race is near the lower left corner, cars are launched from the green mark and the start/finish line is at the red line. A 2 second penalty is added to your time for toppling a cone (very few out there to worry about) and 10 seconds for putting all 4 wheels in the grass – don’t do that! Racers have the opportunity to practice several laps at a time on Friday and/or Saturday and then just 1 shot at the full 5 lap time trial on Sunday.
The track record for this Fall Enduro event is 3:39.12 set by a TUI formula in the A Modified class, an average of 43.824s per lap and 54mph! My best laps during practice were in the 52.0xxs range but I wasn’t that quick in the race. I drove a different race line from what I had practiced and feel that it was better but I just wasn’t faster (you can watch a set of practice laps here). Earlier this year in the Spring Enduro race I ‘drove’ off of the track once during practice laps so I became a little overly cautious about my braking points during the actual races. With such a heavy car the margin of error is pretty tiny when going from floored at 75mph+ to full brakes and into a turn.
This last fall I managed to break the F Street track record of 4:25.195 by over 2 seconds but then I was ‘ICEd’ by a mere 3/10ths of a second- so close! My local F Street class competition comes from a CTS-V and an M3 . The CTS-V driver has raced for years so I guess I feel ok about ‘letting’ him beat me (technically he was my ‘teacher’ at the race driving school I did, go figure.)
Vehicle Lap1 Lap2 Lap3 Lap4 Lap5 total time
’13 Cadillac CTS-V Coupe 53.146 52.684 52.265 52.502 51.976 4:22.573
’12 Tesla Model S 52.145 52.318 53.033 52.712 52.704 4:22.912
’13 BMW M3 53.393 53.026 53.264 53.400 53.091 4:26.174
During the race I was pushing close to 75 mph on the straight and used 6.5 kWhr at an average rate of 1.99 kWhr/mi. The S didn’t seem to become noticeably power limited until somewhere around the 4th straight. Through the first 3 laps there was enough power that I could spin the wheels on most of the track so keeping just at the edge of slipping and not dropping too much power can be tricky. Power limiting kicked in on the straights for the last 2 laps and the brakes lost a little confidence by the last lap. For these last laps I pretty much just mashed the throttle to the floor on corner exits, surprising how similar my lap times were…think it means I need to do a bit better in the first 3 laps, read:drive smoother and tighter lines! Driving faster isn’t always faster, taking smooth lines without a lot of slop is usually faster but from an observer it may look slow.
Before I headed out to the track I tried sketching a race line and checking turn radii. After practice and speaking with some locals I tweaked my planned line a bit and ended up with something a little different. My goal was to try and hit all of the apex points that I could on the backside, hopefully something like this
Next Siskiyou Sports Car Club event and the first race of 2015 is the SSCC Spring Enduro, Counter clockwise around the wide curve at the top, past the start line then a hard left and right into the lower loop clockwise up the gut and back around to the finish…
See you there!
Lifestyle
Tesla Semi hauls fresh Cybercab batch as Robotaxi era takes hold
A Tesla Semi was filmed hauling Cybercab units out of Giga Texas for the first time.
A Tesla Semi loaded with Cybercab units was recently filmed leaving Gigafactory Texas, marking what appears to be the first documented delivery run of Tesla’s autonomous two-seater. The footage shows multiple Cybercabs secured on a flatbed trailer being hauled by a production Tesla Semi, a truck rated for a gross combination weight of 82,000 lbs. The location is consistent with Giga Texas in Austin, where Cybercab production has been ramping since February 2026.
The sighting follows a wave of Cybercab activity at the Austin facility. In late April, drone operator Joe Tegtmeyer spotted approximately 60 Cybercabs parked in two organized groups in the factory’s outbound lot, the largest concentration observed to date. Units being staged in an outbound lot is a standard pre-delivery step, and the Semi footage is the logical next frame in that sequence.
En route with @tesla_semi pic.twitter.com/ZfuOjaeLH1
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) May 7, 2026
This is not the first time Tesla has used its own Semi to move Tesla products. When the Semi was unveiled in 2017, Musk noted it would be used for Tesla’s own operations, and over the years Semi prototypes were spotted carrying cargo ranging from concrete weights to Tesla vehicles being delivered to consumers. In 2023, a Semi was photographed transporting a Cybertruck on a trailer ahead of that vehicle’s delivery launch.
The Cybercab itself was first revealed publicly at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event on October 10, 2024, at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, where 20 pre-production units gave attendees rides around the studio lot. Musk stated at the event that Tesla intends to produce the Cybercab before 2027. The first production unit rolled off the Giga Texas line on February 17, 2026, with Musk posting on X: “Congratulations to the Tesla team on making the first production Cybercab.”
Tesla’s annual production goal is 2 million Cybercabs per year once multiple factories reach full design capacity, with the company targeting a price under $30,000 per unit. Tesla has confirmed plans to expand its robotaxi service to seven cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas, building on the unsupervised service already running in Austin. Musk has said he expects robotaxis to cover between a quarter and half of the United States by end of year.
Tesla has taken home the “Overall Loyalty to Make” award from S&P Global Mobility for the fourth consecutive year, reinforcing Tesla owners’ willingness to come back. The 2025 awards are based on S&P Global Mobility’s analysis of 13.6 million new retail vehicle registrations in the U.S. from October 2024 through September 2025. The complete list of 2025 winners includes General Motors for Overall Loyalty to Manufacturer, Tesla for Overall Loyalty to Make, Chevrolet Equinox for Overall Loyalty to Model, Mini for Most Improved Make Loyalty, Subaru for Overall Loyalty to Dealer, and Tesla again for both Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make and Highest Conquest Percentage.
Tesla’s streak in this category started in 2022, and the brand has now won the Highest Conquest Percentage award for six straight years, meaning it keeps pulling buyers away from other brands at a rate no competitor has matched. Tesla’s retention among Asian households reached 63.6% and among Hispanic households 61.9%, rates that significantly outpace national averages for those groups. That breadth of appeal across demographics adds a layer of significance to a win that some might dismiss as routine.
The timing matters too. After several consecutive quarters of decline, Tesla’s share of U.S. EV sales jumped to 59% in Q4 2025. That rebound, arriving just as competitors were flooding the market with new models and incentives, suggests Tesla’s loyalty numbers are not simply the result of limited alternatives. Buyers are still choosing it when they have plenty of other options.
What keeps Tesla owners coming back has a lot to do with the and convenience of charging. The Supercharger network is the most straightforward example. With over 65,000 Superchargers globally, it remains the largest and most reliable fast-charging network in the world, and owners who have built their routines around it face a real practical cost when considering a switch. Competitors have made progress, but the consistency, speed, and availability of Tesla’s network is still the benchmark the rest of the industry is chasing. Then there is the software side. Tesla has built a model where the car you own today is functionally different from the car you bought two years ago, through over-the-air updates that add continuous game-changing improvements such as Full Self-Driving that has moved from a driver-assist feature to an increasingly capable autonomous system. For many Tesla owners, leaving the brand means starting over with a car that will not get meaningfully better over time, and that is a trade-off fewer and fewer are willing to make.
Cybertruck
Tesla Cybercab just rolled through Miami inside a glass box
Tesla paraded a Cybercab in a glass display at Miami’s F1 Grand Prix event this week.
Tesla set up an “Autonomy Pop-Up” at Lummus Park in Miami Beach from April 29 through May 3, 2026, embedded within the official F1 Miami Grand Prix Fan Fest. The centerpiece was a Cybertruck towing the Cybercab inside a glass display case marked “Future is Autonomous,” rolling through the beachfront crowd.
Miami is on Tesla’s confirmed list of cities for robotaxi expansion in the first half of 2026, making the promotion a strategic promotion that lays groundwork in a target market.
This was not Tesla’s first time using Miami as a showcase city. In December 2025, Tesla hosted “The Future of Autonomy Visualized” at its Miami Design District showroom, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach. That event featured the Cybercab prototype and Optimus robots interacting with attendees. The F1 pop-up this week marks Tesla’s return to Miami and follows a pattern Tesla has been running since early 2026. Just two weeks before Miami, Tesla stationed Optimus at the Tesla Boston Boylston Street showroom on April 19 and 20, directly on the final stretch of the Boston Marathon, letting tens of thousands of runners and spectators meet the robot for free, generating massive earned media at zero advertising cost.
Tesla is sending its humanoid Optimus robot to the Boston Marathon
Tesla has confirmed plans to expand its robotaxi service to seven cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas, building on the unsupervised service already running in Austin. Musk has said he expects robotaxis to cover between a quarter and half of the United States by end of year. On the production side, Musk told shareholders that the Cybercab manufacturing process could eventually produce up to 5 million vehicles per year, targeting a cycle time of one unit every ten seconds. Scaling robotaxis to 10 million operational units over the next ten years is a key condition of his compensation package, alongside selling 20 million passenger vehicles.
As for the Cybercab’s price, Musk has said buyers will be able to purchase one for under $30,000, with an average operating cost around $0.20 per mile. Whether those numbers hold through full production remains to be seen.
Cybercab at F1 Fan Fest in Miami
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Tesla Giga Texas buzzing as new Cybertruck appears to enter production
