News
Elon Musk says Autopilot can have ‘significant improvements’ via software update
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that current Autopilot can see ‘significant improvements’ via an over-the-air software update. The announcement was made on Sunday after Musk took to Twitter to reveal that he had earlier talks with Bosch, maker of the radar equipment used on the Model S and Model X. Aside from feeling hopeful that the existing Autopilot system can be improved without hardware upgrades, Musk also thanked driver-assistance technology company MobilEye “for their help and support in making Autopilot better.”
Btw, want to thank both Bosch and MobilEye for their help and support in making Autopilot better. Please direct all criticism at Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2016
When questioned about whether radar would be capable of detecting people – previous tests pitting a moving Tesla vs. a live human suggested that current versions of Autopilot were not great at detecting humans – Musk defended the company’s use of radar stating that radar can in fact detect humans at moderate range, however Tesla’s Autopilot suite also uses ultrasonic sensors which are “very good at human detection”.
It can at moderate range, but our ultrasonics are very good at human (or anything >= water density) detection
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2016
Musk did not provide any details on when the next update of Autopilot would arrive, but did say that Tesla Version 8.0 would be the company’s largest software release since the first rollout of Autopilot 1.0.
V8 will be our biggest release since v1, so taking longer to refine. Awesome on every level. Meeting w design team every day.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2016
Musk also took the opportunity to defend his position on Autopilot after Consumer Reports criticized Tesla for releasing the auto-steering feature within the Autopilot suite. CR along with mass media have continued to put pressure on the Silicon Valley automaker and energy company to reconsider the use of beta software after Joshua Brown was killed when his Model S driving on Autopilot collided with a tractor trailer.
Musk posted a link to the a great write up by a Tesla owner on TMC who shared his thoughts on Autopilot. He also tweeted praise on an article in The Guardian entitled “The First Self-Driving Car Fatality Proves Nothing.”, by John Naughton. The author quite correctly points out, “In the US, about 33,000 people are killed in automobile accidents every year. That’s 90 a day on average. So on 7 May, about 89 other people as well as Joshua Brown were killed in car crashes. But we heard nothing about those 89 personal and family tragedies: the only death that most people in the US heard about was Mr Brown’s.”
Tesla customers are v smart & don't want media speaking on their behalf abt Autopilot. Recent poll: 0.0% want it disabled — not 0.1%, 0.0%.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2016
Media and even the US Senate want to get in on the Tesla bashing fun. The New York Times claims “the race by automakers and technology firms to develop self-driving cars has been fueled by the belief that computers can operate a vehicle more safely than human drivers. But that view is now in question after the revelation on Thursday that the driver of a Tesla Model S electric sedan was killed in an accident when the car was in self-driving mode.”
Really, asks Naughton? He refers to a recent report by the Rand Corporation that says, “[F]ully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate performance prior to releasing them for consumer use.
“Our findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability. And yet, it may still not be possible to establish with certainty the safety of autonomous vehicles.
“Therefore, it is imperative that autonomous vehicle regulations are adaptive — designed from the outset to evolve with the technology so that society can better harness the benefits and manage the risks of these rapidly evolving and potentially transformative technologies.”
The hope here is that concerns about Autopilot do not turn into a media driven maelstrom. If Musk’s tweets are any indication, Tesla is laser-focused on bringing about its next generation Autopilot 2.0.
News
Tesla snags Semi supply deal with major logistics firm
Tesla has snagged a deal with IMC Logistics to supply the company with 50 Semi units for its logistics operations.
IMC handles drayage and landside logistics and has over 2,700 asset trucks in its fleet. In its over forty years of service, it has established more than 50 locations across the United States and spans operations from coast to coast.
Jim Gillis of IMC said that the addition of the Tesla Semi will help IMC move toward a “zero-emission service for long-haul lanes.”
The move is one that has become more common over the past few years, as more and more companies doing large-scale logistics have moved to sustainable powertrains, using either Tesla or others.
🚨 IMC Logistics announced that it will add 50 Tesla Semis to its fleet https://t.co/ymh1Ca2IuX
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 5, 2026
Tesla’s Semi program just entered its first truly public phase, as the company handed over its first production units to companies in September, although a pilot program with companies like PepsiCo. and Frito-Lay has been ongoing for years.
IMC announced its intention to purchase 50 Semi units from Tesla in September, and according to VP of Marketing and Public Relations on September 29 to Trucking Drive, the company will take delivery either this week or took delivery late last week.
With surging prices of diesel and high logistics costs, Tesla and the Semi could truly revolutionize how companies manage their fleets. With the advent of Full Self-Driving, the Semi will potentially cut down on driver fatigue and increase productivity, while decreasing the cost of operation per mile by being cheaper to refuel.
Tesla had a dedicated Semi handover event at the Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, a few weeks back, as it officially introduced its truck to many company fleets that have been waiting to add these sustainable powertrains.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.