Lifestyle
Politics aside, EVs will be — must be — the future of transportation
President-elect Donald Trump hardly professed to be a friend of clean renewable energy during his campaign, that’s for sure. The forces of change toward a sustainable energy future for the U.S. and world, however, are so powerful and dynamic that a Trump presidency may not be able to stop them. The momentum inspired by Tesla’s Elon Musk, MIT’s Electric Vehicle Team, the Google Self-Driving Car Project, Panasonic batteries, “Last Mile” transportation, The Route electric refuse trucks, and so many other electric vehicles is too strong and too ingrained in our culture to be stymied now.
As Rebecca Solnit wrote in her classic book, Hope in the Dark, “You possess the power to change the world to some degree, the current state of affairs is not inevitable, and all trajectories are not downhill.” With activism and advocacy, as well as technological innovations that emerge regardless of political times, clean renewable energy sources will continue to expand. They must, for the sake of our planet.
For example, some things just have not changed in Americans’ relationships to their cars. Over the past 50 years, automobiles have been our freedom machines, a means of both transportation and personal identity expression. In the same way that Henry Ford matched a youthful and euphoric generation to the combustion-engine automobile, so, too, will tomorrow’s automakers continue to design strategic moves to shape the industry’s evolution.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are at the heart of that vision for tomorrow’s consumer domestic transportation. Here are some reasons why EVs will continue to flourish and change the way automakers in the U.S. and abroad have conducted business as usual.
Automakers will continue to know what the customer wants and provide it
Consumer acceptance has already established a formidable EV market. EVs include a large portion of hybrid electrics, which means that, even beyond 2030, the internal-combustion engine will remain — at least partially — relevant. Yet we’ll likely encounter a common culture of electrified vehicles –hybrid, plug-in, battery electric, and fuel cell — in the years to come. But only an iconoclastic automaker will offer consumers a combustion engine without the electric perks.
Consumers just want to be connected
The capacity to be able to consume novel forms of media and other technology applications while driving will only become more prevalent among commuters. This will be possible, in part, through enhanced levels of automotive software competence. It’s an immediate gratification world already, and, with the emergence of new forms of infotainment technologies and virtual realities, consumers are only going to yearn for more connectivity. Traditional automakers will give their customers what they want in connectivity, inching every so much closer to comprehensive EV technologies.
Suite of “apps” found within EVE for Tesla
Improvements in battery technology and costs
Through continuous improvements in battery technology and cost, electrified vehicles will become more “normal” and more likely to be found in the average American’s garage. As a result, EVs will increasingly grab market share from conventional vehicles. With battery costs potentially decreasing by $150 to $200 per kilowatt-hour over the next decade, electrified vehicles will be able to compete more heartily and broadly with conventional vehicles. Automakers will migrate to this new battery technology because it will make obvious financial sense.
A more widely available charging infrastructure
Increasingly, many retailers are seeing the benefit of customers who browse inventories deeply and purchase more intensely as they wait for their EVs to charge outside in the parking lot. This collaboration between EV drivers and retailers will certainly expand the demand for and number of corridor-based charging stations. Shopping centers, entertainment stops, and EV charging may require charging station standardization, of course, for the gestalt to be fully pervasive. That will take consensus-building with other charging station manufacturers.
A local restaurant advertising to Tesla owners at the Las Vegas Supercharger.
Autonomous technology
Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), with their associated active safety precautions, will quickly allow the automobile to become a platform for drivers and passengers to choose how to use their transit time. EVs and ADAS are so interwoven already that the future must continue those marriages. Yes, there’s still lots of progress that needs to be done around technological and regulatory issues fronts, but is it excessive to think that around 15 percent of new cars sold in 2030 could be fully autonomous? Not really.
Diverse mobility solutions are coming
Traditional business models of car sales will be complemented by a range of diverse, on-demand mobility options. These are sometimes called “last mile” solutions and are particularly necessary in dense urban environments that limit private car entrance. Think central London. EVs are certain to be integral to the trend to increase and diversify on-demand mobility and data-driven services.
Stricter emission regulations
We’re not really sure that a Trump presidency will speed federal regulations toward greater fuel efficiency, if some comments he made on the campaign trail can actually find their way into governance. But, if the U.S. holds to its pledges to further the goals of the Paris Climate Conference (also known as COP21), automakers will scramble to balance out their catalogs. Their gas guzzling behemoths in the full-sized truck category will need their siblings, fuel-efficient EVs. Traditional automakers may have no other recourse than to adopt an EV line of offerings in order to offset those nasty truck MPGs.
The push for traditional automakers to become more capital efficient
Like any business, traditional automakers are under constant pressure from stockholders, who want to see lower overheads, improved fuel efficiency, and reduced emissions. Even if incentives toward purchases of EVs expire, stockholder influences may propel a shift of automaker perspectives, based on little more than the bottom line. This push toward greater capital efficiency will necessarily lead to new business relationships between automakers and technologists.
Competition from abroad
Always on the (pun intended) horizon is the looming threat of other countries and their automotive innovations. It seems unlikely that a Trump administration can foster the political power to exclude car imports, and, anyways, U.S. automakers would like nothing more than to transform their models for the global marketplace. For example, China’s emergence as the world’s largest automotive market can only expand in the coming years and, with that need to supply an enormous consumer base, will be trends toward EVs. U.S. automakers may find themselves outside the marketplace if they don’t keep up with their counterparts abroad.
Conclusion
A white paper titled “Automotive revolution — Perspective toward 2030” describes how the coming generations should see the share of electrified vehicles range from 10 percent to 50 percent of new-vehicle sales. Adoption rates will be highest in developed dense cities with strict emission regulations and consumer incentives. These include tax breaks, special parking and driving privileges, or discounted electricity pricing. Sales may be less robust in small towns and rural areas with lower levels of charging infrastructure and higher dependency on driving range.
As Hillary Clinton said in her concession speech, “Never stop believing that fighting for what’s right is worth it.” Changing consumer preferences, tightening regulation, and technological breakthroughs, among myriad other factors, point to the dominance of EVs in the decades to come. We’ve got to use this moment in political time to rise up and speak out for the future of electric vehicles.
Elon Musk
Tesla FSD is about to know your specific house and neighborhood better than any map
Tesla confirmed it is building a feature that lets you teach your car where to go.
Tesla is building a feature that will let drivers talk to their car in plain language and teach it exactly what to do, with the vehicle remembering those instructions for every future trip. Tesla VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy confirmed it this week on X after a user pointed out one of FSD’s most persistent real-world limitations is that the system has no way to receive contextual instructions the way a human driver would.
“FSD would be twice as useful in neighborhoods if I could actually talk to the car and tell it which driveway to pull into, the same way I would with a person driving me home. Right now, there isn’t really an input for telling Tesla what color the house is or giving it specific context like that. Google Maps is also notorious for putting pins on houses that aren’t actually yours.” Tesla owner Chris further noted, “It would be so cool if I could talk to the car while going down my street and say something like, ‘It’s the white house on the left, just past that SUV,’ and then have FSD remember that for next time.”
FSD would be twice as useful in neighborhoods if I could actually talk to the car and tell it which driveway to pull into, the same way I would with a person driving me home.
Right now, there isn’t really an input for telling Tesla what color the house is or giving it specific…
— Chris (@ChrissGPT) July 8, 2026
This feature would carry more weight than it might seem. Grok has been available inside Tesla vehicles since July 2025, expanded to European vehicles in February 2026, and gained a hands-free “Hey Grok” wake word with location-based reminders and natural-language navigation in the Spring 2026 update. But up to this point, Grok has had no authority over how FSD actually drives. Lane changes, braking, speed, and parking maneuvers remain entirely within FSD’s autonomous decision-making loop. What Elluswamy confirmed is that the next step pushes Grok into a supervisor role, one that translates spoken intent directly into driving decisions.
Tesla teases greater Grok FSD integration and ‘Banish’ feature ‘in about 3 months’
Elluswamy acknowledged at a January 2026 conference that while fully integrated voice control is on Tesla’s roadmap, “it opens up an entire area of testing that we have to do. For example, you shouldn’t be able to tell the car to crash, and it shouldn’t crash.” Elon Musk subsequently confirmed on June 23 that Grok voice commands will pass to FSD’s planning layer by September 2026, a three month timeline from confirmation to deployment.
The deeper significance is what this does for Tesla’s AI training flywheel. Every time an owner corrects FSD with a spoken instruction and the car learns and remembers it, that interaction becomes a data point covering an edge case that no simulation or scripted test could have generated. A fleet of millions of Tesla vehicles crowdsourcing hyper-local contextual knowledge, which driveway, which gate entrance, which side of the street, builds a layer of geographic and behavioral intelligence that competitors without a comparable fleet simply cannot replicate at the same speed or scale.
As Teslarati has reported, Tesla’s Cybercab and robotaxi operations have expanded to Miami following the Austin launch, with rider profiles already collecting preference data. Voice-taught contextual instructions linked to individual rider profiles means a Cybercab could eventually know before it arrives exactly which entrance to use, where to wait, and how to navigate the final hundred feet of any trip it has made before.
Lifestyle
Tesla app update makes Robotaxi ownership make a lot more sense
Tesla’s app now shows a live indicator when your car is actively driving itself.
A recent Tesla app update, released last week (4.58.5), gives visibility on whether a vehicle is navigating in its semi-autonomous mode or being drive by a human driver. The updated app now displays a live “Self-Driving” indicator in bright blue text directly beneath the vehicle’s speed readout whenever Full Self-Driving is actively engaged, along with the signature glowing blue navigation path that FSD users see on the main touchscreen. It is a small visual update with meaningful implications for how Tesla owners monitor their vehicles remotely.
The feature was first spotted in the wild by X user Jordan Camina, who shared video of a Hardware 3 Model S displaying the new animation through the app while driving. That detail is significant because it confirms the update is not limited to newer HW4 vehicles. It works across hardware generations, and Tesla confirmed it will eventually support all vehicles regardless of chip platform once both the app and vehicle software are updated. The vehicle side requires software version 2026.20.6.1, which has reached nearly 40% of the fleet so far, as monitored by NotaTeslaApp.
The feature makes the most practical sense when viewed through the lens of Tesla’s expanding robotaxi operation. In a robotaxi context, the owner of a vehicle generating ride revenue has a direct financial and safety interest in knowing whether their car is operating under autonomous control at any given moment. The app’s new FSD indicator gives fleet owners exactly that visibility, the same way a logistics company monitors whether a delivery driver is following the planned route. It also carries implications for Tesla’s insurance model. Tesla’s own insurance product prices premiums in part based on FSD engagement rates, and real-time visibility into when FSD is active creates a feedback loop that could eventually tie directly into policy pricing. For individual owners who have opted their personal vehicles into the robotaxi network, the update effectively turns the Tesla app into a fleet management dashboard, one that tells you whether your car is earning money, whether it is driving itself to do it, and whether everything is operating the way it should from wherever you happen to be.
Tesla expands Robotaxi to Florida, marking its third state for autonomy
As Teslarati has reported, Tesla launched unsupervised robotaxi rides in Miami this summer, a milestone that makes a remote FSD status indicator significantly more practical than a cosmetic feature. When a vehicle is operating as a robotaxi without a driver present, the owner or fleet operator needs a reliable way to confirm autonomy is engaged. The app now provides exactly that.
As noted by NotATeslaApp, The update also arrived alongside a hint buried in the same app version that Tesla plans to use the cabin camera to verify driver identity before FSD can be activated. Pairing identity verification with a live autonomy status indicator points toward the infrastructure Tesla is building for a fleet of driverless vehicles that owners can monitor the way you would track a package delivery.
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.
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.
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! pic.twitter.com/TTrMql2aRg
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) June 17, 2026
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.
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.
Tesla shows rapid teardown of Model S and X lines, paving the way for Optimus at Fremont
Elon Musk admits he was ‘clearly wrong’ about Anthropic
