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Climbing Mountains with the Tesla Model S

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Visiting Adirondacks

My recent roadtrip to Lake Placid, NY, a beautiful destination nestled within the Adirondack Mountains, gave me the opportunity to experience climbing mountains with the Tesla Model S.

Trip Planning

As with any Tesla road trip you need to make sure you’ve mapped out a charging plan for the trip, especially if the location takes you away from Tesla Superchargers. I was able to top off some charge at the Albany, NY Supercharger along the way but I knew this would be more of a challenge once I reached my destination. Tesla has been aggressively expanding their HPWC across hotels and popular destinations, but unfortunately Lake Placid, NY hasn’t been one of them. PlugShare indicated that there were two charging options in the area.

Odd NEMA 6-30 locationThe first was at a Price Chopper grocery store which had a public (and free) J1772 charger. The store allowed people to use their chargers for up to 2 hours, but that wouldn’t be enough time to receive a meaningful charge. Plus, this location was also not close to the hotel we were staying at.

The second option I found was a rather unusual entry on PlugShare that showed a charging spot with standard outlets and a NEMA L6-30A outlet. Tesla doesn’t provide or sell a NEMA L6-30 adapter but I found one on Amazon and purchased it for the trip. Upon arriving at the charging location, I had to drive around a few times before finding a set of outlets attached to a tree in the back lot of the Crowne Plaza Lake Placid Hotel.

Crowne Plaza Lake Placid Plug

Charging through a NEMA L6-30 at Crowne Plaza Lake Placid Hotel

Having this reassurance that there’s a dedicated parking space with working charger, and at my hotel, I knew I could get plenty of charge to get me around town and sightsee.

I struck up conversation with a maintenance-man who’s worked at the hotel for over 20 years. After the usual “No they don’t actually catch on fire” conversation (when will that ever end??), I was told that the hotel placed these outlets here for the purpose of plugging in engine heating devices for gas cars. This is needed during the frigid winters, but according to him EV owners are also more than welcome to use it, as needed. He said, “if you’re paying for the rooms you’re more than paying for the electric too”. True.

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Climbing Mountains

There’s a group of Tesla owners that get together on occasion and drive their Model S’ up Mount Washington. The timing has never worked out for me but it’s certainly something that I look to do down the road. Whiteface Mountain is one of the larger mountains in the Adirondacks and has a peak of 4,865 feet. There’s an access road that lets you drive up to 4,610 feet, but anything after that and you’re on your own.
Whiteface Mountain

I’ve never driven up large mountains before in the Model S so my range anxiety flared up for the first time in a long time. Could I drive up the mountain without running out of battery?

Just to be sure I was planned out, I double checked my routes against EVTripPlanner and it confirmed that I could make it up the mountain as long as I had buffered 15% of range for the hillclimb. I ended up using 14% of my energy to climb the mountain and regenerated 7% on the way back down.

Tesla Trip Planning feature

Tesla Trip Planning feature

The drive up and down the mountain was absolutely gorgeous and it made driving the Model S more fun than it already is. I never touched my brakes the entire way down. Below is a video of my experience as captured through my BlackVue dashcam.

Summary

Climbing mountains with the Tesla Model S couldn’t have been more fun. Finding charging locations, tackling the unknowns of traversing a large mountain and regen’ing all the way back down, all added to the amazing adventure.

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We don’t often take destination trips such as this, but this positive experience had us wanting to go back for more. Until next time.

Amazing Area - Adirondacks

"Rob's passion is technology and gadgets. An engineer by profession and an executive and founder at several high tech startups Rob has a unique view on technology and some strong opinions. When he's not writing about Tesla

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville

The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.

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The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”

MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.

Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.

It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.

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Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.

With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.

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Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”

Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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