News
Future Teslas Could Come “Energy Included”
Future Teslas could come “energy included”, no matter how much you drive, for the life of the car. Crazy as it sounds, Tesla can actually make money giving Tesla owners free energy at home not just at Superchargers. Key components are already on the road or under development at Tesla. So, how would this work, when will it happen and what does it mean for Tesla owners and Tesla investors?
How it works
Tesla can provide grid regulation and stabilization services worth as much as the energy used for charging, or more, by centrally controlling the time and rate at which Tesla cars are charged. Embedding a modest up-front cost increment into the price of a special Tesla charging connector, pays energy cost in excess of earnings from grid regulation and stabilization as an “annuity”, and can leave a lot of money in Tesla’s pocket, too. This model is similar to Tesla’s Supercharger business – there is a detailed analysis of Tesla’s Supercharger business I did a while back on Seeking Alpha.
Owners will handle charging differently. Instead of setting charging current, normal or range charging, and (optionally) the charging start time, the owner will instead set a time for charging to be completed and whether a normal or range charge is needed by that time. The Tesla charging control center will then match the charging rate of each Tesla car using over-the-air communication links to earn grid regulation fees and capture the best electric rates while making sure each car is recharged when the owner needs to drive off.
Central Control of Charging Rate Provides Grid Stabilization
Your garage charging connector will be fed from a separate meter and the connector will “identify itself” to the car to enable Tesla controlled charging.
Two things make this scheme economically viable. There is flexibility in exactly when your Tesla charges because most days the charging time is much less than the time your car spends plugged in overnight. This flexibility lets charging be “timed” to help regulate the grid. When wind generation surges due to gusts, or when system load suddenly drops, chargers can be switched on to “swallow” the power surge. The grid system operator, working through the Tesla charging control center can rapidly adjust the charging load to help stabilize the grid.
Rapid adjustment of loads on the grid is valuable because it allows the grid to use more wind power with less fossil generation online as “spinning reserve”. When a large number of car chargers quickly switch on to “swallow” a surge in wind generated power, the value of the “regulation down” can actually be greater than that of the energy used by the chargers. At these times, the system operator will actually pay to have cars charge!
When will free home charging happen?
The answer is, we aren’t there yet. Utilities are only beginning to wrestle with what happens when large amounts of battery storage get connected to the grid. This turns out to be quite complicated. This Sierra Club Energy-Storage Cost-Effectiveness paper offers a summary of the results of several grid storage studies done for the California Independent System Operator (CAISO). At this point we can’t do a specific financial model because technologies, rate structures and even how grid regulation will work with attached storage have not been set.
There are also, at this point, too few Tesla cars on the road to make their charging a significant source of grid regulation. And so far, there is no central control system in place to coordinate the charging of Tesla cars. But times are changing.
CAISO now operates a unified energy imbalance market (EIM) across all or parts of seven states (CA, ID, NV, OR, UT, WA, WY). Within a few years one can imagine upwards of half a million Teslas registered in these states. When these cars are (mostly) plugged in for charging at night, they together represent several giga-watts of load that can be switched on or off in seconds, using the central charging control scheme. That’s a lot of wind regulation capability that requires almost no additional capital investment. It just might get us “free” energy to charge Tesla cars in their owner’s garages.
Status: Where are we on the path to free energy?
Tesla is doing a lot more with grid connected storage and grid regulation than many Tesla owners, and even many Tesla investors realize. In May of this year, J.B. Straubel, Tesla’s Chief Technology Officer made the keynote presentation at Silicon Valley/ SEEDZ Energy Storage Symposium. He discussed a surprising array of Tesla storage products already being made and installed in grid applications, from small residential storage systems being rolled out by SolarCity to large industrial units delivering hundreds of kilowatts. Video of JB’s presentation is available on YouTube here.
A lot of the hardware needed for central charging control of Tesla cars is already part of every Tesla. Every Model S already has a big battery, of course. And high power 10kW or 20kW chargers that are controlled through the touchscreen and the car’s computer. Every Tesla car has a broadband communication link to Tesla company computers that is used to download software updates. These links are available to control charging on a car-by-car basis. Tesla already makes a high power wall connector (HPWC) that can be installed with connection through a standard utility meter. Buying and installing one of these will probably be a requirement to get “free” charging at home.
The only part of the remote charging scheme that isn’t online today is the central control system for “aggregating” car charging so it can be controlled by the grid system operator. Everything else needed to implement aggregated charge control for Tesla cars is either already in production at Tesla or available off the shelf as commercial products or communication services.
In his talk, JB describes aggregation of many residential storage systems to allow the grid operator to use that distributed resource in much the same way aggregated car charging control might be used to stabilize and regulate the grid. At the end of his talk, there is a Q and A session. Someone asks what Tesla’s plans are for eventually implementing the aggregated control center JB described. His answer, “We are building it now.”
Should Tesla owners / investors care about this?
Probably, but some caution is warranted. Tesla owners already talk to their ICE driving friends about how much less electricity costs compared to gasoline or diesel fuel. If in the future all Tesla charging is free, both at home and from Superchargers when traveling long distances, Tesla owners will be left with literally “nothing” to talk about – something their fossil fueled friends may (or may not) appreciate.
For Tesla investors, the prospect of making all the energy for Tesla cars free has some big implications. If the economics parallel those of the Supercharger business, Tesla could see very large additional profit (billions of dollars at least) for something that would require negligible new capital investment by Tesla.
There will be indirect benefits for Tesla, too. Already Tesla cars offer the advantage of much lower energy cost compared to ICE cars, and even hybrids. Free charging at home and at Superchargers would make Tesla cars energy cost even lower than other electric cars which get charged on the owner’s electric meter. While the absolute economic advantage of free charging, compared to other electric cars, will be modest, the emotional value of getting energy for free should never be underestimated as a competitive edge in the market place.
And of course there is the plain, simple novelty of offering a car that costs nothing to run. This is a feature no other car is likely to have, and which no other car (with the exception of soap box derby and solar-car competition cars) has had before. It is newsworthy, people will talk and write about it and it will produce a lot of buzz and free advertising for Tesla. Tesla investors need to be careful not to be overcome with hysteria as the shares go up, yet again.
Disclosure: Author is long Tesla.
Elon Musk said today on X that Teslas will start to learn your individual preferences. This is something that he seemed to hint toward earlier this month when he said parking was by far the biggest reason drivers intervene with Full Self-Driving.
Musk made the comment in response to notable Tesla influencer Whole Mars, who said that his vehicle will sometimes disobey the settings he has enabled for his car. He responded to the post, stating that “The car will start to remember your specific interventions and match each person’s individual preferences.”
The car will start to remember your specific interventions and match each person’s individual preferences
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 18, 2026
This is something that could be perhaps one of the biggest ways Tesla could minimize or even work closer toward eliminating interventions altogether. While FSD does a lot of things really well, many people intervene a vast majority of the time not due to major or critical safety errors.
Instead, many take over because the car is doing something that they do not like as a preference; it might park in a parking spot that is not preferred by the driver, it might linger too long in the left lane on the highway (a personal favorite), or it could even take a route that the driver does not like.
These all lead to interventions, but they are not triggered by a major safety issue. Instead, it’s just preference.
READ OUR REVIEW OF TESLA’S LATEST FSD VERSION:
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3.5 Early Impressions: new features and early performance
If Teslas could start to learn the personal preferences of the person who owns them, interventions will truly begin to be less frequent. Some of this is already pretty evident, in my opinion. Teslas use a neural network to learn behaviors and accumulate data to improve performance.
For months now, we’ve tracked FSD’s performance at “Except Right Turn” stop signs, something that is very common in Pennsylvania, but many of our readers located in other parts of the U.S. have never heard of. FSD handles one Except Right Turn stop sign very well, one that I travel past frequently. Others that I do not navigate through as often do not have as confident a performance. It seems like the cars might already be doing this to an extent.
🚨 Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3 proceeds through an Except Right Turn Stop Sign pic.twitter.com/YemRSlens7
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 8, 2026
That example is also for something that is a street sign and not necessarily a driver preference; however, I still feel it is worth mentioning because it only handles that commonly passed Except Right Turn stop sign with true confidence. Others it still seems to struggle with.
This could be one of Tesla’s big moves toward full autonomy, and it could be a pathway to truly unsupervised driving. Every day, millions of cars on the road travel at a human driver’s personal preferences with no incident. Why can’t autonomous vehicles still cater to a passenger’s preferences while being autonomous? Tesla seems to have the idea that it would be possible.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has sharply criticized legacy media outlets for what he describes as selective and biased reporting on vehicle accidents involving Tesla. In a recent X post, DeSantis questioned why headlines routinely spotlight the Tesla brand in crash stories, even when human error is the clear cause, while similar incidents with other automakers often receive generic treatment.
A prime example is the June 19, 2026, fatal crash in Katy, Texas. A Tesla Model 3 driven by Michael Butler struck a brick home at high speed, killing 76-year-old Martha Avila inside. Initial reports and headlines prominently featured “Tesla crash” and referenced the driver’s claim that an automated driving-assistance system was engaged.
Many outlets quickly speculated that Full Self-Driving or Autopilot were the cause of the crash, immediately blaming the suites for the accident shortly after it happened.
However, Tesla responded shortly after the accident with vehicle data that showed Butler manually overrode the system by pressing the accelerator to 100 percent, reaching 73 MPH in a residential area, more than double the speed limit. The accelerator remained floored after impact.
Tesla finally clarifies fatal Texas crash, confirms driver manually overrode acceleration
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) later confirmed these findings, and Butler now faces manslaughter charges. His phone searches also included queries like “Tesla FSD too timid,” suggesting he may have intervened aggressively. Despite this, many headlines continued to center Tesla’s technology rather than the driver’s actions.
DeSantis highlighted a Washington Post headline, which was labeled, “Newly released photo shows wreckage of Tesla crash that killed grandmother.”
Do legacy media outlets typically use headlines involving the make of a car in a crash or is that only for Tesla?
It would be one thing if the self-driving malfunctioned but the crash was purely human-induced.
Seems like these outlets want to associate Tesla with crashes as… pic.twitter.com/EmfyeYiuv6
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) July 17, 2026
The subheadline noted the driver overrode assistance and floored the accelerator, yet the brand name dominated the framing. He asked whether legacy outlets typically name the make of a car in routine crashes or reserve that treatment for Tesla to push a narrative.
This pattern appears widespread. Crashes involving Ford, Chevrolet, or Toyota vehicles frequently appear as “pickup truck slams into home” or “fatal car crash kills pedestrian” without brand specifics, especially absent new technology angles.
High-profile Ford F-150 or Chevy Silverado incidents tied to large sales volumes often escape brand-callout scrutiny. In contrast, Tesla stories consistently lead with the manufacturer, amplifying perceptions of risk despite data showing strong overall safety performance:
🚨 Why do Tesla Owners get so defensive over the narrative of crashes involving Teslas? https://t.co/aX7ogtjTCR pic.twitter.com/KO4QWaLOKl
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 24, 2026
Tesla’s own 2025 Impact Report indicates vehicles using FSD logged 0.19 major incidents per million miles, roughly eight times fewer than the U.S. average. Models like the Model Y also rank among the safest in IIHS and NHTSA testing for occupant protection. Critics argue disproportionate coverage ignores these statistics and driver behavior factors, such as younger or more aggressive Tesla owners in some studies.
DeSantis frames this as part of a broader political agenda against innovative American companies like Tesla. By consistently naming Tesla while downplaying others, media outlets risk eroding public trust and shaping perceptions detached from the evidence of human error in most cases.
As autonomous technology evolves across the industry, consistent and factual reporting will be essential to separate real safety concerns from narrative-driven coverage.
Tesla entered two new markets this week by advancing its presence in Latvia (Europe) and officially launching operations in Uruguay (South America), marking a rapid dual-continent expansion.
These moves underscore the company’s strategy to tap into emerging EV markets with supportive policies, renewable energy grids, and growing demand for sustainable transport.
Latvia: Strengthening the Baltic Footprint
In Latvia, Tesla has built on its earlier registration of Tesla Latvia SIA in late 2025 with recent steps toward full operations, including job postings for a service center and representation in Riga. This aligns with broader Baltic expansion following Lithuania’s model of pop-up stores and service centers.
Coming to Latvia https://t.co/XNkQQJ2O6a pic.twitter.com/yS9kpcNky1
— Tesla Europe, Middle East & Africa (@teslaeurope) July 17, 2026
EV penetration in Latvia stands at around 7 percent for BEVs in new passenger car registrations. 2025 data showed 1,602 BEVs out of about 22,500 total, or 7.1 percent, with combined plug-ins nearing 19 percent. Growth has been steady but below the European average, supported by government subsidies and infrastructure development. Tesla models like the Model 3 lead local EV registrations.
Vehicles for the Latvian market will likely be sourced from Gigafactory Berlin or Gigafactory Shanghai. Charging infrastructure is robust for the region as well, with over 400- 2,000 public points, with Tesla Superchargers in Riga, Jūrmala, and along Via Baltica routes offering up to 250 kW.
Uruguay: Third South American Country
Tesla teased its Uruguay arrival with “Estamos llegando,” or, “We are arriving,” on social media, followed by an official presentation scheduled for mid-July.
Hola Uruguay 🇺🇾
Nuestros Model 3 y Model Y están cada vez mas cerca! pic.twitter.com/FR41fsA7um
— Tesla Latinoamérica (@Tesla_LatAm) June 30, 2026
The company established Tesla Uruguay SAS, homologated Model 3 and Model Y (three versions each), and appointed local leadership. This makes Uruguay Tesla’s third official South American market after Chile and Colombia.
Uruguay boasts one of Latin America’s highest EV penetrations, with battery-electric vehicles exceeding 20 percent market share recently, driven by tax incentives, high fuel prices, and a nearly 95-100 percent renewable electricity grid. Hundreds of Teslas already operate via grey imports, but official sales bring warranties, service, and support.
Vehicles will be imported from Gigafactory Shanghai, enabling competitive pricing for Model 3 and Model Y. Charging plans include Supercharger development alongside existing infrastructure, leveraging the country’s green energy advantage for affordable operation.
Tesla Superchargers follow Model 3 and Model Y to South American country
Tesla’s Dual Continent Expansion
Tesla’s simultaneous push into Latvia and Uruguay demonstrates efficient scaling: prioritizing service and infrastructure first, then direct sales in high-potential niches. In Europe, it fills Baltic gaps; in Latin America, it counters Chinese dominance while leveraging renewables.
This dual move signals Tesla’s ambition to accelerate global EV adoption amid varying regional paces. By addressing local needs, like subsidies in Latvia or incentives and green grids in Uruguay, Tesla not only boosts volumes but advances its mission of sustainable energy.
For investors and consumers, it highlights resilience and opportunity in diverse markets, potentially paving the way for further growth in underserved regions. With strong fundamentals in both, these entries could yield long-term gains as EV transitions mature worldwide.
Elon Musk says your Tesla will start to learn your individual preferences
Ron DeSantis calls out media bias in Tesla crash coverage
