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Jay Leno on Elon Musk & EVs: "I think he should get a certain amount of credit for leading the charge" Jay Leno on Elon Musk & EVs: "I think he should get a certain amount of credit for leading the charge"

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Jay Leno on Elon Musk & EVs: “I think he should get a certain amount of credit for leading the charge”

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Jay Leno recently spoke to Yahoo! Finance about Elon Musk, EVs, and shared why he thinks Elon Musk deserves the credit for EVs being popular today. To be quite honest, I feel that it’s obvious that Elon Musk and Tesla are the reasons why EVs are so popular today. Tesla is the leader of the EV market and is the best-selling type of battery-electric vehicle.

I emphasize battery electric since BYD recently topped Tesla in the market with sales of both battery electric and hybrid EVs. Hybrids are not fully electric but rely on both batteries and fossil fuels yet oddly, count as clean vehicles. For this article, I’m focusing only on battery-electric vehicles.

Although EVs are popular today, they were not just a few years ago. Elon Musk had long been advocating for EVs and was often mocked for it by some critics. Leno, who is a comedian, car collector, and the host of Jay Leno’s Garage, told Yahoo! Finance that his interest in EVs was partially sparked by Elon Musk.

“I think he should get a certain amount of credit for leading the charge because before Elon, [people would say] ‘it’s a golf cart,’” Leno told Yahoo! Finance. “People would joke about electric [that] they’re slow and whatever it might be. So I give him a lot of credit for it. I think EV will be the savior of the classic car industry.”

Leno shared the story of when Elon Musk visited him with the Tesla Roadster prototype in 2007.

“I remember sitting and he said: ‘Well, what I want to do is build charging stations all up and down the coast. And I’m going ‘ok, that’ll happen, that sounds good.’”

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Fast forward from 2007 to 2022, Tesla, under Elon Musk’s leadership, owns and operates the largest global, fast charging network in the world. Tesla has over 35,000 Superchargers not just in the U.S. but also throughout the world.

In July, Tesla opened Beijing’s 100th Supercharger. Tesla’s charging network throughout China is important for Tesla’s mission, especially since China is a key leader in the EV market.

Leno told Yahoo! that Elon Musk began building the charging infrastructure around the same time he started building the car.

“When the car debuted, you could drive LA to San Francisco. And now, you can go anywhere in the country. You see a lot of other automakers get into the EV market saying you can charge it anywhere. You can’t really.”

Eventually, that last statement will be proven false by Tesla as it begins to open up its Supercharging network to non-Tesla EVs. For now, it remains true. Although there are charging stations for EVs, they are not as common as Tesla. In some cases, many charging stations are broken (I’ve seen so many complaints on Twitter and Facebook).

In this article for CleanTechnica published earlier this year, I interviewed the founder and CEO of ChargeSafe, Kate Tyrrell. She wound up being at the mercy of broken EV chargers and it led her to create a business in her region that would help EV charging companies to put safety first.

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Note: Johnna is a Tesla shareholder and supports its mission. 

Your feedback is important. If you have any comments, or concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1

 

Johnna Crider is a Baton Rouge writer covering Tesla, Elon Musk, EVs, and clean energy & supports Tesla's mission. Johnna also interviewed Elon Musk and you can listen here

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Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing

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(Credit: Starlink | X)

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.

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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.

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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.

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Tesla just made its headlights even better through a software update

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Credit: @jojje167 on X

Tesla just upgraded its headlights through a software update, making them even better without any physical or hardware upgrade.

Tesla’s latest software update is quietly improving nighttime driving for a small number of owners. Version 2026.38 includes a new capability called Dynamic Headlight Leveling.

The feature automatically adjusts the aim of the low beams in response to driving conditions and nearby traffic, with the goal of giving the driver more usable light on the road while reducing glare for oncoming vehicles and traffic ahead.

Unlike Tesla’s matrix high-beam system, which selectively dims individual LED segments to create shadows around other cars, Dynamic Headlight Leveling physically tilts the low-beam projectors. Internal motors respond to changes in vehicle pitch.

When the car accelerates hard, climbs a steep grade, or carries extra weight in the rear, the headlights can otherwise point higher than intended. The software counters that movement in real time so the beam stays aimed at the road surface rather than into the eyes of other drivers.

Early indications reveal the update is reaching a limited set of vehicles, including certain Model 3 and Cybertruck examples in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. The rollout does not appear tied to a single hardware revision, and Tesla has not published a broader schedule. It is simply a common waiting game until your car receives it.

The change arrives against a backdrop of wider complaints about headlight glare. Some earlier Model 3 and Model Y vehicles were the subject of an NHTSA recall related to excessive low-beam glare; the software adjustment offers a potential mitigation for cars equipped with the necessary leveling hardware. It does not replace adaptive high beams where those are already available, nor does it alter the basic low-beam pattern itself.

Instead, it keeps an existing beam pointed where it is most useful.

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For drivers who have received the update, the system requires no new settings or user input. The headlights simply respond as road conditions and traffic change. As the feature reaches more vehicles, it adds another example of Tesla using over-the-air software to refine existing hardware rather than waiting for a new model year. Nighttime visibility and reduced glare for others are the practical results owners are expected to notice first.

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Tesla teases “Halloween Mode” update with Optimus rising from a graveyard

Tesla’s Halloween teaser hides a covered vehicle and an Optimus hand rising from the ground.

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Tesla has started teasing a Halloween software update for its vehicles, with  a short clip on X that reads, “Halloween is coming.” The clip opens on a glowing pumpkin before pulling back to the car’s center touchscreen, where the usual parked visualization has been replaced by a graveyard scene, and the vehicle draped with a white sheet so it reads as a cartoon ghost.

The second detail is a robotic hand clawing its way out of the dirt like a zombie, which looks to be the hand of Tesla’s latest Optimus V3 humanoid robot. While Tesla still has not formally shown Optimus Gen 3 walking around in service, renders pulled from Tesla’s Android app last month gave the clearest look yet, including far more refined hands that Tesla has said carry 22 degrees of freedom. The hand has been the hardest part of the program. Musk has called it the majority of the robot’s engineering difficulty, and Tesla’s patents describe a design driven by tendons with the actuators moved into the forearm.

Tesla Optimus V3 hand and arm details revealed in new patents

Optimus also has a Halloween track record. Last October the robot handed out candy in Times Square, and a costumed “zombie” Optimus shuffled around the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles on Halloween night.

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On the software side, Tesla’s 2025 Holiday Update expanded Santa Mode with a Santa sleigh, snowmen, snow effects, and a festive lock chime, so it wouldn’t be too far fetched if we saw something similar but themed for a  Halloween Mode.

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