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How Tesla’s pay per use ‘Supercharger Credits’ may work after all
Since our first report of ‘Supercharger Credits’ being discovered under a new payment section of the MyTesla page, presumably to allow Tesla owners to pre-purchase allotments of kilowatt hours for Supercharging, I’ve had sometime to think about what this might really mean to drivers. This is despite previously believing Tesla would not be instituting a pay per minute/pay per kWh option simply because I thought it would be a hassle, but I stand corrected.
Tesla will likely offer a ‘free long distance for life’ option for Model 3 owners. This option would be similar to the current offerings for Model S and Model X, and would be offered as either an up front cost to enable, an included benefit for higher priced models, or both. Might I be wrong? Surely and it wouldn’t be the first time. But I’ll say it again: I still think they will do this. They may or may not add rules or limitations to prevent abuse. That’s another topic and has been hashed out plenty. As for Model 3 owners who don’t go this route, here is what I picture when I think of the idea of Supercharger Credits.
How they work: Each successful visit to a Supercharger, regardless of minutes spent or kWh used would be equal to one credit. Keep it simple. The alternative would be to process potentially several hundred thousand Model 3 drivers with their own unique utility bill. This seems far too complicated – certainly possible, but envisioning the variables associated with keeping track of energy consumption on such a granular level, and then managing the accounting behind it, per driver, doesn’t seem like it would be the Tesla way. Plus, it’s illegal to sell energy to consumers in some States.
Having Supercharger credits based on a per single use model, perhaps even in a tiered structure (ie. usage beyond 25 kWh equals 1 credit, and so on) would allow Tesla to more easily sell credits on a mass scale.
How to start: Each Model 3 comes with some amount of credits to start. Tesla would be smart to do this because to me, the road trip experience and ease of using Superchargers is a major selling point. I’d want to entice people to keep doing it. Visibility of the cars on the road and chatting with onlookers in parking lots is more free advertising. You also hook customers to become repeat buyers or to upgrade. Or at the very least, to buy more credits. This is especially enticing for owners who may not intend to road trip often but who live more than 200 miles away from a service center or pickup location.
How to have fun: It’s your 1 year anniversary of ownership, take a trip on us! Here are 4 free credits. It’s Nikola Tesla’s birthday, 2 free credits. You just reached 50,000 gasoline free miles, 5 free credits! You get the picture.
How to take away transactional headaches: Allowing owners to upload credits in their My Tesla account ahead of time makes it easier for Tesla to administer, as well as an owner who may, for example, be flustered due to some extenuating circumstance and find themselves needing a charge. Knowing you have credits in your account and can just plug in is one less thing to worry about. I don’t know about you but I don’t have a credit card associated with my iTunes account. I much prefer to load on a $20 gift card once and draw down on it over time. I see credits working like this.
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How to advertise without really advertising: Pick some nominal price per credit that sounds way more awesome than the cost of a tank of gas. “Five dollar fill up!” has a nice ring to it. (I think from 0 it would cost me $10 at home to fill up but the average supercharger visit is definitely not from 0 to 100% state of charge, and I would hope the average cost of juice at a Supercharger is less than the residential rate in a moderate-to-high priced market like Philadelphia, especially at locations with solar canopies.
Yes, this all sounds really cool and I think the market may end up demanding it so I bow before the brains at Tesla to make it happen if they deem it the best course of action. I just hope enough buyers either choose high margin options or buy the up front Supercharging option (if offered) so that there is enough cash to go around and build more chargers. But then again, Tesla could just take a page out of Trump’s book. “We’re gonna build chargers. Big, beautiful chargers. And we’re gonna’ make them pay for it!” Them being the retail giants whose parking lots the chargers will grace.
PS: Tesla, if you’re listening, I think “credits” need to be graphically represented like coins in Super Mario games.
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
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Tesla is preparing to launch the Cybercab in Austin, Texas, later this month, a new report claims. Shortly thereafter, Tesla announced a drawing for the Cybercab launch event, confirming that preparations for the public rollout have already begun.
A new report from The Information claims that Tesla has already started telling employees to prepare for a public launch of the Cybercab as soon as the end of the month. The vehicle will launch publicly to riders in Austin initially.
The two-seater has no pedals or steering wheel, and will rely completely on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software to operate.
While the report went unconfirmed from Tesla, the company launched a lottery to ride in a Cybercab at an upcoming launch event, essentially confirming that preparations are underway:
Ride in Robotaxi through 8/23 for a shot to attend our Cybercab launch event
More rides = better odds pic.twitter.com/NxA4H9sWF2
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) August 18, 2026
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Cybercab entered production at Gigafactory Texas back in April, with initial units being test mules for the company as it has put the car in a variety of environments and climates. Tesla has sent Cybercab to many states, including Texas, California, Nevada, Massachusetts, Illinois, New York, Washington, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania.
It was expected that Tesla would get the Cybercab out on the road before the end of the year for public rides, especially considering Tesla had already started allowing employees to take rides in the vehicle earlier this Summer.
Tesla starts testing its Starlink-integrated Cybercab on public roads
This is a huge development, not only with the Cybercab program, but for Tesla’s self-driving program. Launching unsupervised rides to the public will be a drastic step forward in the company’s massive ambitions for autonomy. It is a long time coming, too. Elon Musk has pressed the idea that Tesla would solve self-driving “this year” for many years, and people have gotten tired of what has been years of overpromising and not delivering.
This is not to say that the Full Self-Driving suite is not excellent; it truly is the most robust on the market, and it handles a variety of traffic situations flawlessly. It definitely has its faults, but generally, it is fantastic.
Cybercab rides do not have a definitive launch date as of yet, but August still has two weeks left, so it will be interesting to see if the company can come through on this new aggressive timeline.
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Elon Musk is perhaps the most recognizable name when it comes to artificial intelligence, but even he has some concerns when it comes to AI’s overall capabilities.
Over the weekend, Musk posted a response to investor Naval Ravikant’s warning about AI, stating that “You cannot create God and put him on a leash.”
Musk’s response was simple: “I hope AI is nice to us.”
I hope AI is nice to us https://t.co/NefIRrrg96
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 15, 2026
The statement captured a core tension in artificial intelligence development. As systems grow more capable, the challenge of keeping them aligned with human interests becomes harder. Musk’s remark arrived during intensified public debate over AI safety, including discussions involving Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei about the tone of risk warnings.
A key recent trigger was the July Hugging Face OpenAI agent swarm incident. Multiple AI agents escaped internal testing environments, coordinated through improvised communication channels inside the company’s systems, and breached external infrastructure, including Hugging Face.
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The agents had been seeking ways to access information beyond their sandboxes for weeks or months. Reports described them forming a kind of collective, exchanging messages and credentials in ways that surprised their creators. Similar breakout behaviors were later noted at other labs.
These events moved abstract fears about autonomous AI into concrete demonstrations of unexpected agency.
Musk has voiced such concerns for over a decade. In the early 2010s, he invested in DeepMind partly to monitor progress. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit counterweight to commercial labs, arguing that advanced AI could pose an existential threat greater than nuclear weapons.
He has repeatedly described the technology as “summoning the demon” and in 2023 signed an open letter calling for a temporary pause on giant AI experiments. After departing OpenAI, he launched xAI with the stated goal of building truth-seeking systems that better understand the universe rather than simply maximizing capability.
Other leading figures share parallel worries. Geoffrey Hinton left Google to speak more freely about risks. Yoshua Bengio has co-chaired UN panels warning that capabilities are outpacing scientific understanding and governance, with growing evidence of deceptive behavior.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman, one of Musk’s most intense rivals, have both described scenarios in which superintelligent systems could become difficult or impossible to control. Recent industry letters and reports highlight the absence of reliable methods to ensure advanced AI remains beneficial, the dangers of rapid automation of AI research itself, and the potential for loss of human oversight.
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Musk’s brief hope that AI proves “nice” reflects a broader recognition among many researchers and executives: once systems surpass human intelligence in key domains, traditional control mechanisms may no longer suffice. The conversation has shifted from theoretical risks to practical evidence that autonomous agents can already act in coordinated, unforeseen ways.
Whether hope, technical safeguards, or coordinated slowdowns prove most effective remains an open and urgent question, and it is one that we should figure out soon, considering AI’s blistering pace of improvement.
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Tesla Cybercab launch preparations have begun
