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I know, I know. Just asking the question, “Is there anything Tesla can’t do?” alone sounds like stooge-level propaganda with a predictable answer at the end: No. However, I promise you that I’m actually considering it objectively in light of what has been parading in the headlines.
The Porsche Taycan vs. Tesla debates were a bit exhausting over the last couple of weeks, but the ‘Plaid Mode’ reveal took them to another level. Then, a German media outlet reported that a Model S already beat the Taycan’s Nürburgring time by almost 20 seconds after all that hoopla about “turns” and overheating being inevitable doom bringers for Tesla.
And all this excitement started co-existing with more news about the spiffy stuff included in the V10 firmware update that Tesla’s Early Access Program participants were downloading. Leaked pictures of the made-in-China Model 3 were really just the icing on the cake yesterday for anyone keeping score.
So, I think it’s fair to start wondering what Tesla has left to achieve that may be a serious challenge.
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Obviously, there’s plenty on the plate for the next few years at least: Model Y, the Tesla Truck, the Tesla Semi, the next generation Roadster, and now refreshed ‘Plaid Mode’ Model S’s and X’s. Oh, and the regulatory hurdles to make Full Self-Driving a legal reality still need to come through. I suppose having a few more Gigafactories would be a good idea also, like the one teased for Europe.
Okay. Perhaps this question is more tedious than I thought. On one hand, Tesla doesn’t need to do everything a car maker could possibly do. Plenty of manufacturers are content with sticking with their niche markets. But I don’t see Tesla settling for that, especially considering all the markets they’re targeting already and the sales numbers they’re aiming to achieve.
How about outdoor-oriented vehicles, considering the next competitor for Elon Musk to comment on will likely be Rivian? The Michigan-based EV newcomer has completely branded itself to appeal to the travel adventure crowd, and their R1T pickup truck has every whiz-bang thing (to borrow a phrase) they could dream of needing for a mountain camping trek. Rivian even has a patent application for a “digital” jerrycan to extend their battery range for such trips.
While the Tesla Truck is coming, a ‘Blade Runner’ cyberpunk theme doesn’t seem to have the Rivian-type customers in mind. That’s fine, but would Tesla want to appeal to that base if it proves lucrative? Why bother building a truck in the first place if you don’t want to attract, you know, truck people? Rivian’s R1S SUV might really be where the customers are, though. The Model Y will appeal to a significant base, but the R1S will tap into another large crowd as well. The Model X may be the Fabergé egg of cars, but sports and camping-oriented families may find an SUV that’s traditionally designed and half the price a bit more…feasible.
It seems like there may be a decent amount of crossover between Tesla and Rivian’s bases – both sets of customers have similar values and possibly similar budgets. Will Tesla make a play with its own rough-and-tumble vehicles? Or will they just peacefully co-exist? I mean, Tesla and Porsche are supposedly not really meant to be competitors, yet there’s still a Model S at Nürburgring despite that um, fact.
What about military vehicles? Other automakers like GM and Ford have developed equipment for defense purposes over the decades, and Musk is already well versed in having government entities as customers via SpaceX. The US military is looking for alternative fuel vehicles, although hydrogen fuel cell tech seems the be the focus. I’m sure Tesla’s tech could easily win any competition, especially given their semi truck work and advanced battery products. But, would Tesla even want that sort of customer? SpaceX and Tesla have different core missions, although they are compatible. I could also lay out some ironies in Tesla developing military vehicles, but I’m sure you can imagine what they are.
Finally, what about smaller vehicles like water crafts, ATVs, motorcycles, etc.? Non-vehicle products? Those are areas several other car makers have entered as separate ventures, and successfully at that. Musk may have once joked about Tesla making an electric leaf blower, but Honda could perhaps vouch for the profitability of home DIY equipment. Rivian has even hinted that it’s developing something that’s ‘not necessarily’ a car. After going from the original Roadster to manufacturing and delivering several types of cars all over the world (not to mention solar kits), Tesla could probably easily outfit its customers’ homes with a variety of other battery-powered products. Tesla vs. John Deere, anyone? I’m not sure what kind of culture war that might ignite, but Musk isn’t really the type to back down from such a challenge.
It doesn’t seem like Tesla needs much more on its plate in the immediate future, but after seeing what they’ve accomplished thus far in so little time, the next expansion may end up being around the corner before we know it.
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Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
Tesla launches Powerwall Lease for affordable home backup
Elon Musk teases Tesla Roadster unveiling once again
