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‘EVTripping’ launches app to enhance the Tesla road trip planning experience

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Planning a road trip with the Model S and Model X is as easy as plugging in a destination address through the vehicle’s onboard Nav, getting in the car, and then going. At least that’s what Tesla’s Trip Planner aims to do, but the truth of the matter is, it falls short on some areas that I find critical when planning for a long distance all electric road trip.

Having gone through a busy summer of traveling, with one Tesla road trip taking me as far as Boston to South Florida, and another trip to Alaska – though this one I flew to, I’ve had time to think about additional features that I myself would like to have access to when planning for an EV trip. I figured that if these are features I felt a need for, there certainly has to be other folks within the Tesla community sharing the same sentiment.

So I decided to build it. EVTripping.com

Alaska

North to Alaska! Picture of Denali, the highest mountain peak in North America

Existing EV Planning Tools

Let’s start by highlighting some of the popular services out there:  PlugShare, Teslarati’s Interactice Supercharger MapOpenChargeMap, and the popular EVTripPlanner. Each service has its own specific purpose, and they all provide a wealth of information for trip planning. But still I wished I can somehow combine features from each service into one app, but also add to it with additional features.

I’ve compiled a wish list of features that I hope to address with EVTripping.

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  • At present time no app or service that I know of, outside of the existing Tesla navigation system, is able to predict charge times needed for charging stops. Tesla does it but they tend to be overly optimistic about how much charge time is needed. (EVTripPlanner has since added more realistic charge times which is very helpful)
  • We need to be able to see true elapsed time for the trip in order to better predict where one will be at any given time
  • It would be nice to be able to see points of interest along the journey such as destinations for food.
  • Being able to export the trip planning details in digital form or print it out as a PDF would be a nice to have.
  • Weather is a variable that can change along your journey. This should be reflected when planning for a Tesla road trip.

Creation of EVTripping

I’m proud to announce that less than 6 months after I conceived the idea for a new online trip planner, EVTripping.com was born.

EV-Tripping-Full-Logo-1000PX

If you want to learn more about the sequence of events that led to the launch of EVTripping.com, follow along and check out the timeline which describes everything that’s being worked on.

Response to the site has been overwhelmingly positive despite very limited coverage so far. We’ve added over 200 1000 registered users in less than a week and routed almost a quarter million miles on the production site.

I’ll speak of the site in terms of “we” and “our” because, while I’m the chief cook and bottle washer for the site, I see this as a project for and by the community. Many of you are already helping by filing bug reports, suggesting feature requests and sharing ideas.

We’ve been busy this first week of launch. We’ve fixed bugs, added international support, adjusted time based on a user’s geography, built multi-language support, added foreign character support, and continue to refine the routing intelligence. Early users of the app have been super helpful and supportive so I’d like to thank each and every one of them.

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Free Tesla Monitoring

I’ve written an open-source tool before that allows me to take control of my Tesla while also monitoring my SolarCity production. EVTripping adds much of the same functionality when it comes to notifications. The app will monitor your Tesla and remind you when it’s time to rotate your tires, how much you’re driving, the efficiency you’re getting, and more.

Not plugged in

I’m focussed on building the tools I need for my Tesla lifestyle and will share them with the community along the way.

The Future

We’re not done yet with EVTripping. I call this stage the “minimum viable product”. Where we go from here will depend on you and others within the EV community. Though I have plenty of product level ideas, we can decide on these together.

One of my big dreams for the site is to add support for other EVs beyond Tesla. I’m defining an EV as an electric vehicle capable of taking a road trip using Superchargers, CHAdeMO, CCS, etc, versus one that you can take trips in, but have to plug in for many hours each time you stop.

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There’s no shortage of media outlets covering Tesla, and fantastic podcasts like Ride the Lightning and Talking Tesla, but my focus since I began writing was to talk about the lifestyle component of owning, and living, with a Tesla. It’s been a fun journey thus far and I’m excited about what the future holds as I continue to build out EVTripping for you and the greater EV community.

"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

Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO

SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.

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SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.

The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.

Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors

Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.

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For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.

The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.

The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.

Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.

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Elon Musk

Tesla is sending its humanoid Optimus robot to the Boston Marathon

Tesla’s Optimus robot is heading to the Boston Marathon finish line

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Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot will be stationed at the Tesla showroom at 888 Boylston Street in Boston, right along the final stretch of the Boston Marathon today, ready to cheer on runners and pose for photos with spectators.

According to a Tesla email shared by content creator Sawyer Merritt on X, Optimus will be at the Boston Boylston Street showroom on April 20, coinciding with Marathon Monday weekend. The Boston Marathon finishes on Boylston Street, and the surrounding area draws hundreds of thousands of spectators along with international broadcast coverage. Placing Optimus there puts it in front of a massive public audience at zero advertising cost.

The Tesla showroom is at 888 Boylston Street, between Gloucester Street and Fairfield Street. The final mile of the marathon runs directly along Boylston Street, with runners passing the big stores before reaching the finish line at Copley Square.

Optimus was first announced at Tesla’s AI Day event on August 19, 2021, when Elon Musk presented a vision for a general-purpose robot designed to take on dangerous, repetitive, and unwanted tasks. In March 2026, Optimus appeared at the Appliance and Electronics World Expo in Shanghai, where on-site staff stated that mass production of the robot could begin by the end of 2026. Before that, it showed up at the Tesla Hollywood Diner opening in July 2025 and at a Miami showroom event in December 2025.

Tesla’s well-calculated display of Optimus gives the public a low-pressure first encounter with a robot that Tesla is preparing  to soon deploy at scale. The company has previously indicated plans to manufacture Optimus robots at its Fremont facility at up to 1 million units annually, with an Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas targeting 10 million units per year.

Tesla showcases Optimus humanoid robot at AWE 2026 in Shanghai

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Musk has said that Optimus “has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time,” and separately that roughly 80 percent of Tesla’s future value will come from the robot program. Whether that holds depends on production execution. For now, Boston gets a preview of what that future looks like, standing at the finish line on Boylston Street while 32,000 runners pass by.

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Elon Musk

Tesla’s golden era is no longer a tagline

Tesla “golden era” teaser video highlights the future of transportation and why car ownership itself may be the next thing to change.

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Tesla Cybercab Golden Era is Here (Credit: Tesla)
Tesla Cybercab Golden Era is Here (Credit: Tesla)

The golden age of autonomous ridesharing is arriving, and Tesla is making sure we can all picture a future that looks like the future. A recent teaser posted to X shows a Cybercab parked outside a home, and with a clear message that your everyday life may soon look like this when the driverless vehicles shows up at your door.

Tesla has begun the rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the production of its dedicated, fully-autonomous Cybercab vehicle. The first Cybercab rolled off the Giga Texas assembly line on February 17, 2026, with volume production now targeted for this month. Additionally, the Robotaxi service built around it is already running, without human drivers, in US cities.

Tesla Cybercab production ignites with 60 units spotted at Giga Texas

The Cybercab is built without a steering wheel, pedals, or side mirrors, designed from the ground up for unsupervised autonomous operation. Musk described the manufacturing approach as closer to consumer electronics than traditional car production, targeting a cycle time of one unit every ten seconds at full scale.

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Drone footage from April 13, 2026 captured over 50 Cybercab units on the Giga Texas campus, with several clustered near the crash testing facility. Musk has noted that Tesla plans to sell the Cybercab to consumers for under $30,000, and owners will be able to add their vehicles to the Tesla robotaxi network when not in personal use, potentially generating income to offset the vehicle’s purchase cost. That model changes the math on vehicle ownership in a meaningful way, making a car something closer to a depreciating asset that can also earn by paying itself off and generate a profit.

During Tesla’s Q4 earnings call, the company confirmed plans to expand the Robotaxi program to seven new cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas. The service already runs without safety drivers in Austin, and public road testing of the Cybercab has expanded to five states, including California, Texas, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts.

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