News
I took a Tesla Cybertruck Demo Drive — Here’s what I learned
Upon learning that Tesla was offering Cybertruck Demo Drives across the United States, I decided to sign up for one. I have not gotten my hands on what is inarguably the most unorthodox vehicle on the market right now (and likely ever), but I’ve been lucky enough to see plenty of them in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Florida, where I took a vacation in April.
I went in with a very open mind. I love to drive a larger vehicle, and a pickup truck, while I’ve never owned one due to lack of necessity, is probably my favorite thing to journey around in.
I decided to book the Demo Drive at the West Chester, Pennsylvania, Showroom just outside of Philadelphia. I took the roughly 90-minute ride out to Chester County on Tuesday. Here’s what I learned from my 30-minute ride:
First things first, it’s a modern marvel of vehicle engineering
While I’ve seen a lot of Cybertrucks, I’ve never gotten up close and personal with one. I don’t necessarily feel super comfortable walking up to anyone’s car and doing a deep examination, so I waited for the right opportunity.
The Cybertruck is obviously eye-catching, but I was really impressed with how this one looked in terms of build quality.
I know that there were some issues early on with Cybertrucks, but it’s no surprise that something like this would be relatively difficult to put together early on. I didn’t see many inadequacies in how these units were built.
There were two parked out front and so many readying for customer deliveries in the back. According to the employee I took my Demo Drive with, they had delivered 300 units so far.
You don’t really feel like you’re driving a pickup
I’ve driven a lot of trucks in my life: F-150s, F-250s, Dodge Rams, Toyota Tundras, and Tacomas.
One thing I noticed getting into the Cybertruck, it doesn’t really feel like you’re driving a truck. It feels sporty, fast, and agile. I was impressed by that, I am not sure what it was about it; perhaps it was the standard ride height or just the overall design of the pickup. I feel like I sit up much higher in a traditional pickup.
The F-150 Lightning, for example, feels like you’re sitting in a regular truck: you’re up high, it feels wide and bulky. It’s in no way sporty. It’s fast, because it’s an EV, but it’s a completely different feel.
It truly captures what Tesla meant when it said it wanted to redesign the pickup.
Steer-by-Wire is incredible
The showroom employee I spoke to said that they have trouble turning a Model 3 around through their narrow parking lots. If they need to swing it around, they can do it, but it requires a multiple-point turn.
He then told me that thanks to the steer-by-wire on the Cybertruck, this wasn’t as much of a task. “We actually have less of a hassle getting the Cybertruck turned around. It’s amazing.”
I had to make a U-turn during a portion of my drive, and I was also told that a traditional pickup truck driver had to back their vehicle up to make the turn. When they were tasked to do the same turn in the Cybertruck, they didn’t trust that it would make it.
It did without any issues.
I felt like it was a very easy adjustment. It took all of 30 seconds to get used to the more advanced turning system in the Cybertruck compared to a regular vehicle. It is probably my favorite part about the whole truck.
It’s fun to drive on open routes and backroads
I remember writing about how much fun the Model 3 Highland was to drive on backroads. The Cybertruck is probably just as fun.
But it also is really fun to drive out in the open on state routes that are busy and have multiple lanes. Some cars get kind of monotonous on the straightforward streets. I wasn’t really ever bored with it (maybe I would be after more than 30 minutes).
It was smooth and fast and hugged corners really well. I never questioned taking turns in it, even sharp ones when I was at a stop sign. It just handled and drove really well, and I do think the steer-by-wire was a big reason for that.
I would get it wrapped
One thing that stood out to me a lot was the overwhelming amount of fingerprints on the door.
This was pretty much a non-negotiable argument that I would absolutely get my Cybertruck wrapped if I ever decide to snag one. I wouldn’t want to constantly be wiping these things off, even though I really love the stainless steel. Matte black would be my choice.
So … will we see each other again?
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) August 14, 2024
Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed my drive. I have been a fan of the Cybertruck since it was unveiled in 2019. It’s hard to believe I was only with Teslarati for a few months at that point, and here I am five years later, and this truck is now being seen pretty frequently.
Whether you’re a fan of it or not, I would really recommend you go see it and check out all the awesome features. Even if you have no intention of buying one, go take a drive and feel the steer-by-wire, the unique size, and agility of such a large truck, and take in what is one of the coolest cars out on the market right now.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
