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Craft Brewery opens in SpaceX’s backyard, creates special beer for employees

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When their shifts are over, SpaceX employees in Hawthorne, CA only have to walk a short way to their favorite new hangout: Los Angeles Ale Works. The soft opening of the area’s first craft brewery a couple of weeks ago has allowed SpaceX employees to personally sample a variety of what will be the house signatures brews — two-dozen taps pouring a wide variety of styles of small batch beer. Starting Thursday, when the grand opening will take place, crowds will descend upon the former industrial building and Hawthorne’s first brewery and tasting room. For now, a bunch of the SpaceX employees and locals have been savoring Los Angeles Ale Works’ inviting space.

Los Angeles Ale Works already serves two varieties named after SpaceX: a low-alcohol session India Pale Ale named Space XPA and a Space XPA Full Thrust double IPA.


“From California citrus to Chinese tea, I want to showcase the whole range of flavor that L.A. is known for,” says Ale Works co-founder Kristofor Barnes, “and the brewery is a great way to work with all the amazing, interesting, and creative people I’ve met through the beer industry.” The brewery, with a modest 10-barrel system, will reportedly offer many taproom-only variants and one-off brews to supplement core offerings, which will be distributed to bars and restaurants around Los Angeles.

Showcasing that variety of ales and lagers, the brewery features a long, L-shaped bar overlooking the brew house. A SpaceX banner drapes from the brewery’s 24-foot-high beams. There’s also a separate custom-built lounge-and-conference room combination with pub games and ample space to chat or tweet. Other than the interesting beer selection, what will probably be Los Angeles Ale Works’ most popular feature is a patio adjacent to the parking lot for some decadent beer-sipping with rays and shades. There is also enough room for some local food trucks to stop by and add their aromas to the fun.

Los Angeles Ale Works is the dream-come-true of head brewer Barnes. In 2013, Los Angeles Ale Works launched its first beers into the marketplace after a successful Kickstarter fundraiser. Working with Ohana Brewing Co, they tenant-brewed proof of concept beers to gather valuable feedback from customers. In 2015, Barnes added business expertise to the office side with Andrew Fowler and Jeff Szafarski, and together the ownership group raised capital.

Now Barnes’ original idea is grounded in brick and mortar. “There’s a huge void of breweries in Hawthorne, and you have this huge high-tech business sector — including SpaceX, Tesla, some of the ancillary companies — so we knew there was a built-in consumer base with those industries,” said Fowler. The affluent and educated SpaceX group is a welcome demographic for Los Angeles Ale Works, which considers itself an experimental brewery.

Set in a handsome 9,600-square-foot brick structure built in 1952 by Northrop Grumman, the brewery is part of an area-wide conversion from dilapidated industrial buildings to upscale destination. Another brewery is expected to open in the same light-industrial zone off El Segundo Boulevard. SpaceX entry into the area served as a magnet for other business, with another architectural evolution currently underway in which a complex of studios under construction nearby will eventually have the capacity to showcase the work of 100 different artists. The area’s rebirth is infusing much more community and aesthetics to this section of town, and “a lot of people are moving into the neighborhood,” Fowler acknowledged.

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The original notion of listening to their customer base continues at the new Hawthorne location. Szafarski stated that they intend to solicit beer style ideas from customers and then produce them. “Customer feedback is very important to us. We have a lot of beers on tap that give people a reason to come back tomorrow and not six months from now.”

The name Los Angeles Ale Works is a nod to the early years of the business, when Barnes borrowed equipment from a downtown Los Angeles brewery.

Carolyn Fortuna is a writer and researcher with a Ph.D. in education from the University of Rhode Island. She brings a social justice perspective to environmental issues. Please follow me on Twitter and Facebook and Google+

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Watch Tesla’s “guardian angel” FSD feature take over for collision evasion

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Tesla’s Automatic Collision Evasion feature can be seen in one of the first owner videos of it in action.

Tesla owner Spencer (@scotsrule08) posted on Monday that the feature “worked flawlessly,” saying FSD reengaged itself just as he was about to hit a curb. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla’s AI team, shared the clip and wrote, “A guardian angel always looking out for you.”

The video arrives in the middle of a staged rollout. Tesla first shipped Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD (Supervised) v14.3.9 in software update 2026.27.6 earlier this month, which Teslarati covered as it reached cars. Update 2026.27.10, which began going out on September 19, carried the feature improvements with FSD v14.3.10, according to release notes tracked by Not a Tesla App. The newer 2026.27.11 build is now reaching another wave of vehicles.


The feature only runs on HW4 vehicles, and it requires an active FSD purchase or subscription with both FSD (Supervised) and Automatic Emergency Braking enabled. HW3 owners receive FSD v14.2 Lite in the same updates, but that build does not include collision evasion.

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Tesla’s release notes describe two triggers. The first is an imminent frontal collision that braking alone may not prevent, in which case the car can activate FSD to steer, brake or accelerate around the hazard. That scenario is limited to highways below 85 mph, with no pedestrians or cyclists detected and no slippery road surface. The second covers a driver who appears inattentive, such as reaching into the back seat, or who seems to have switched off FSD by accident. Spencer’s curb clip appears to fall into that second category.

Tesla plans big safety improvements for Full Self-Driving v15

Once the system takes over, the accelerator is muted and light brake input will not cancel the maneuver. Drivers need to apply firm, deliberate steering force to take back control, and the car chimes to hand control back once the danger has passed.

Elluswamy recently noted that earlier hazard prediction, faster reaction time and better collision avoidance would arrive with FSD v15, the next major version.

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Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig

Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.

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Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”


The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.

This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.

What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.

That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.

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Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production

Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.

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Concept rendering of Tesla Optimus in mass production

Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.

Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.

Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.

New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point

Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.

Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.

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