Connect with us

News

Ford shows BlueCruise hands-free driving while CEO Farley takes jab at Tesla

Ford will begin offering its new BlueCruise hands-free highway driving system to customers later this year after 500,000 miles of development testing and fine-tuning the technology on a journey across the United States and Canada. Mustang Mach-E pictured.

Published

on

Ford released a new video of its BlueCruise hands-free driving system earlier today. It didn’t come with a straightforward approach, either as the company’s CEO, Jim Farley, took a jab at Tesla in a Tweet that highlighted the new driver assistance feature.

Ford’s BlueCruise is the legacy automaker’s crack at a semi-autonomous driving functionality that aims to increase driver safety on the roads. Tested over a fleet of Ford vehicles that include the Ford F-150 pickup and the Mustang Mach-E, Ford employees accumulated over 100,000 miles of travel while using BlueCruise. Compared to other semi-autonomous driving features currently available on the market, Tesla Autopilot has been used for an estimated 22.5 billion, yes billion, miles of driving through its testing. This has been accumulated through the use of Tesla’s owners to improve the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving suites’ performance that the automaker offers to customers. Basic Autopilot is included with all Tesla vehicles, while Full Self-Driving currently costs $10,000.

To test BlueCruise’s capabilities while traveling on the road, Ford performed the Mother of All Road Trips, or MOART, as it referred to the testing phase. It wasn’t a matter of testing the features on clean, dry roads, either. Ford drivers inevitably hit severe weather during the massive trek across some of the United States’ most popular highways and interstates, ensuring its confidence while traveling through some of the more challenging terrains and road conditions that can provide some motor vehicle operators with headaches.

The reason Ford chose to have its employees operate the testing scenario instead of its real-world owners is unknown. However, criticisms of Tesla’s use of its owners to test the Full Self-Driving Beta seems to be the subject of Ford CEO Jim Farley, who tweeted that “We [Ford] tested it in the real world, so our customers don’t have to.”

Advertisement
-

Recently, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) stated that Tesla’s use of its real-world owners to test its FSD Beta was a “potential risk to motorists and other road users,” according to a note written by NTSB chief Robert Sumwalt, according to CNBC. However, drivers have essentially pleaded as to why they should be included in the testing phase. Tesla owners are never required to utilize Autopilot or the FSD Beta if they do not want to. Owners have called for an expansion of Tesla’s Beta program in several cases, and it has led to CEO Elon Musk nearly doubling the size of the testing group. Tesla has also removed owners from the FSD Beta testing sequence if they did not utilize it properly.

Ford’s BlueCruise will vary depending on the vehicle that is being driven. It will cost $1,595 in the F-150 pickup and $3,200 in the Mach-E, Fox Autos said. It will require a three-year, $600 subscription to connected service in the all-electric Mach-E and will be updated through Over-the-Air software updates.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

Advertisement
Comments

Cybertruck

Tesla is ending Cybertruck production

Published

on

Credit: diagnosticdennis/Instagram and @smile__no via Tesla Owners of Santa Clarita Valley/X

Tesla is ending Cybertruck production sometime in mid-2027, according to CEO Elon Musk.

Musk made the announcement on X last night, which came as a shock to many. He said that the Cybertruck will end production “to make room for increased Cybercab production” at Gigafactory Texas.

It is a huge blow to the fans of Tesla who have come to love the Cybertruck and identify with it as a symbol of their fandom. It has been the best-selling electric pickup, but it has had an underwhelming sales performance in terms of what was expected. This is mostly due to Tesla not meeting the prices it planned to offer the Cybertruck, as its unveiling and actual release were four years apart.

Overall, the responses were mixed. Some fans understood the move toward Cybercab production, especially as Tesla is truly pushing the autonomous future through its Robotaxi platform. However, others did not understand it.

Advertisement
-

“Damn, how many Cybercabs do you guys need?” one response read. Another said it was “Sad but understandable.”Even analyst Gary Black had responded to the news, stating he hoped Tesla planned to replace it with a traditional pickup design.

It doesn’t seem like that will be the case.

Tesla is so hell-bent on delivering autonomy and eventually providing a driverless service that owning a car seems like an arbitrary idea, according to their thesis. Instead, Cybercabs will be available to pick you up and drop you off on demand, safely, without any human help.

As a result, Tesla has thinned its lineup considerably, and one can only ask where the vehicle lineup goes from here. Eventually, it seems like Cybercab could be the only vehicle that Tesla will sell.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

SpaceX’s next Starship flight set to make history on Friday the 13th

SpaceX is targeting Friday, November 13 for Starship Flight 15 and its first ship catch.

Published

on

By

SpaceX is targeting Friday, November 13 for Starship Flight 15, the mission the company plans to use for its first attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower.

SpaceX Vice President of Launch Kiko Dontchev shared the date on stage at the UP.Summit on Thursday, according to Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, who was in attendance. It is the first launch target to come directly from a SpaceX executive. Until now, the public schedule had relied on FAA air traffic planning slides, which listed Flight 15 for no earlier than November 8 and later November 12. SpaceX has not posted an official mission page yet, and no launch time has been shared.

The date lands inside the window Elon Musk sketched out last month. Speaking at Giga Texas on October 10, Musk said the flight would “probably launch a little bit before Thanksgiving,” as Teslarati reported. On SpaceX’s third quarter earnings call ten days later, he confirmed that Flight 15 would try to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the ship, and put the odds of a successful ship catch at “more likely than not.” SpaceX also aired an animation of the maneuver during that webcast, showing the ship swinging vertical over Starbase before dropping into the tower’s chopsticks.

The hardware is ready. Booster 22 fired all 33 of its Raptor engines for a full duration static fire at Pad 2 on October 25. Ship 42 followed with a single engine burn simulating a deorbit maneuver on October 26 and a 60 second firing of all six engines the next day, according to NASASpaceflight. Ship 42 had already rehearsed the catch in September, when the Pad 2 arms lifted it into position and crews connected the quick disconnect arm while the vehicle hung from the tower.

The remaining hurdle is regulatory. The FAA’s Starship page does not yet list a Flight 15 license. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in October that, after “significant constructive engagement with the FAA,” she expects the license to cover a return to the launch site and a tower catch for both stages. Bringing the ship home means a reentry path that heads toward land, rather than ending over open ocean as every Starship flight so far has.

Advertisement
-

SpaceX has caught Super Heavy three times, on Flights 5, 7 and 8, but the ship comes back from orbital velocity and has never been caught. Flight 14 on September 28 was the first Starship to reach orbit, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites before splashing down despite an early engine shutdown that Musk blamed on engine computer software.

Musk has called a successful ship catch “the first time that there’s been full recovery of an orbital class rocket,” and he has already named the step after it: a Flight 16 where both the booster and the ship fly again. NASASpaceflight reports that Ship 43, the next vehicle in line, is set for static fire testing in December.

Continue Reading

News

EVgo taps Tesla Superchargers for mass charging expansion

Published

on

Credit: EVgo

EVgo has tapped Tesla Superchargers for its most recent efforts to expand its charging presence in the United States, a move that seems logical based on the effectiveness of the automaker’s own infrastructure.

EVgo opened its first Supercharger site in Illinois, a 12-stall station near downtown Chicago at 3145 South Ashland Avenue in the Riverside Square & River’s Edge center, right beside a grocery store. This marks the start of the company’s plan to deploy hundreds of Supercharger stalls across the United States, primarily at grocery-anchored Regency Centers properties where drivers can shop, eat, or run errands while they charge.

The new location uses Tesla’s Magic Dock technology so both NACS and CCS vehicles can plug in natively without drivers needing to carry their own adapters. Peak power reaches 325 kW at this site, with pricing set between $0.25 and $0.35 per kWh depending on the hour—the same rate for Tesla and non-Tesla drivers.

The stalls also appear in Tesla’s in-car navigation and Trip Planner, making them easy for Tesla owners to find and route to. Illinois has seen EV registrations rise nearly 60 percent over the past two years, and EVgo’s broader network has experienced more than 700 percent growth in charging demand over three years, so the timing fits the market’s trajectory.

Choosing Tesla hardware through the Supercharger for Business program turns out to have been a smart, practical move.

Tesla’s V4 stalls and cabinets deliver high, reliable power with a proven track record of strong uptime, while Magic Dock delivers true dual-standard compatibility in one package. Because the sites show up in Tesla’s navigation tools, EVgo instantly gains visibility among millions of existing Tesla drivers, which should raise utilization and help the company double its addressable market as more vehicles adopt NACS. EVgo still owns the stations and sets pricing, yet benefits from Tesla’s established hardware, longer cables, and operational support.

The result is faster, lower-risk infrastructure expansion that serves every EV driver—Tesla or otherwise—with convenient, high-power charging at everyday retail locations. For drivers, that means fewer adapters, more predictable stops, and a denser network just as electric vehicles become everyday transportation.

Continue Reading