Lifestyle
Electric GT’s Tesla racing series will be a test of driver strategy to avoid overheating
Electric GT, officially known as the Electric Production Car Series, is expected to begin its inaugural season this coming November. Teams of the electric car championship series will be using 10 track-modified Tesla Model S P100D, which are stripped down and fitted with racing components to reduce weight and maximize power. The first track-ready car was showcased recently in a video from auto veteran and former Top Gear and Fifth Gear presenter Tiff Needell, who was able to get behind the wheel of Electric GT’s P100D race car in a test drive around the nearly 2.9-mile Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya in Barcelona.
While Tiff was impressed by the power and handling of Electric GT’s Model S P100D race car, the vehicle’s limitations immediately became apparent after being driven hard for a lap and a half. After this, the electric car experienced overheating issues, forcing the electric car to stop on the pits to be cooled down. Considering that Electric GT plans to hold 37-mile races for its inaugural season, it would be quite tricky to have vehicles that would only be good for a couple of laps before they overheat.
A spokesperson for Electric GT recently addressed what happened to the P100D race car during Tiff’s test drive. According to the spokesperson, the vehicle had been out in the heat all day before it was driven by the former Top Gear and Fifth Gear host. Engineers from the racing series also noted that some of the car’s sensors did not work properly, allowing the Model S P100D race car’s battery to get hotter than it should have.
“The team spotted an accidental disconnection of one of the outdoor temperature sensors from the air conditioning system, which caused the air conditioning system to not send cold air to the battery and other systems when needed. There is always a limit if the power is used indiscriminately, but the resistance threshold is much higher if the air conditioning system had worked correctly. The team has now fixed that,” the spokesperson said.
Considering the limitations on the Model S P100D race car, the Electric GT spokesperson noted that the vehicle would be able to run the race distances — but with some strings attached. Instead of taking advantage of the race car’s 778 hp all the time, the vehicles would be running at a more manageable 470 hp. The spokesperson further noted that drivers would have full control to decide when to use their P100D race car’s full power, such as when overtaking or dashing to the finish line. This, at least for the inaugural season, would be “part of the strategy and part of the show.”
While using the vehicle’s weakness as a point for strategy is a clever move by Electric GT, the overheating issues of the Model S P100D when driven hard on the track are undeniable. The Model S P100D, after all, is a monster on the drag strip, but it still has teething problems on the track. Fortunately for Tesla’s vehicles, these teething problems do not appear to be present in the Model 3. Over the past months, Model 3s have been taken to the track and driven hard, and not one issue of overheating has emerged from the Tesla community so far. The Model 3 even won the 2018 Canadian Sport Compact Series Time Attack series on its category, and that car was not even the performance version. Nevertheless, the Model 3 Performance, a car that Elon Musk stated is 15% faster on the track than a BMW M3, is set to begin deliveries soon. Once the vehicle saturates the racing market, Electric GT would be wise to adopt the Model 3 Performance as an option for its next racing seasons.
With the Model 3, Tesla is ushering in a new era for its electric cars. The Model 3 might be Tesla’s entry-level vehicle by definition, but its battery tech and electric motors were designed and created at a time when Tesla already had experience in the electric car industry. The Model 3’s 2170 battery cells, for one, are a significant step up from the 18650 cells present in the Model S and Model X. These battery cells are bound to make their way to Tesla’s two flagship vehicles though, most likely in an upcoming and much-speculated Model S and X refresh. If or when this happens, the idea of a Model S track car that can handle events far beyond a 37-mile race would be extremely plausible.
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Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
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.
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