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
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’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!
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
