News
All-electric Lucid Motors ‘Air’ reaches 217 mph in high speed stability test
Making a grand entrance at the 117th-annual New York International Auto Show today is electric car startup Lucid Motors. The California-based maker of the “private jet on wheels” is debuting its ultra luxury Lucid ‘Air’ along with its Alpha Speed Car, which recently completed its first high-speed stability test at a software limited 217 mph (350km/h).
The fully autonomous capable Lucid Air represents a new take on luxury vehicles, packing in amenities often found in private jets and boasts expansive space with an exterior footprint of a mid-sized car. On paper, the Air may seem like a direct competitor with current Silicon Valley sweetheart, Tesla’s Model S. However, one can argue that the Lucid Air – with its Maybach quality interior and unprecedented performance – is better equipped to stand in a class of its own. The Air will ship with autonomous ready hardware, and when paired with the distinct focus on passenger comfort and luxury, the all electric powertrain that’s capable of 400 miles of range and 1,000 horsepower starts feeling like a different kind of experience altogether. Impressively, the luxury of the Air will start at just $52,500 after federal tax credits, which is a sizable savings from the costlier Tesla Model S.
ALSO SEE: Tesla Model S vs. Lucid Air: comparison of range, performance and price
Lucid Motors is raising capital to build out the first phase of manufacturing from its upcoming plant in Casa Grande, Arizona. The $700 million factory is expected to begin production on the Lucid Air in 2019 and produce 10,000 vehicles within the first 12 months. Lucid Motors revealed through today’s press release that the factory will reach full capacity in 2022 and produce 130,000 vehicles annually.
The company also announced through the press release that it has begun high speed testing of an Alpha prototype of the Air.
“In preparation for production, Lucid Air Alpha prototypes are undergoing a rigorous development program. Lucid has designated one of these test prototypes as a high-performance test vehicle and has installed a roll-cage for safety purposes. The Alpha Speed Car will be used for evaluating at-the-limit performance.”
Lucid completed the high speed stability on a 7.5 mile oval race track at the independent automotive testing ground TRC Ohio. The vehicle was able to successfully complete the stability and high speed testing at a staggering 217mph (350km/h).
Here are some amazing photos captured during the high speed run.
Unlike Tesla which produces lithium ion battery cells with partner Panasonic, Lucid has locked in an exclusive battery deal with Samsung SDI and will utilize “next-generation cylindrical cells that are able to exceed current performance benchmarks in areas such as energy density, power, calendar life and safety”, according to an announcement made by the company.
Results from Lucid’s 217 mph high speed testing would indicate that the company may have developed a sophisticated battery thermal management system that allows the battery pack to supply maximum output to the vehicle’s high efficiency motor. Lucid Motors Chief Technology Officer Peter Rawlinson has taken his years of experience, previously working at Tesla where he served as Chief Engineer, and rolled that into a battery management system that overcomes thermal limitations faced by Tesla’s system. The Electric GT all-Model S race team experienced some overheating issues after spending time on the racetrack with their Model S:
“The problem is the car has thermal limitations. You can have a very fast car on a qualifying lap, then it goes back to nominal power for 15 or 16 laps…If you save the temperature you can peak it again. The challenge will be to drive as quickly as possible without overheating the motor.”
Only time will tell if Lucid Motors can deliver on its grand vision of the future. If the test drive we took in Los Angeles is any indicator of what’s to come, Lucid Motors is on track to live up to its promises, tenfold.
Lucid Air Makes International Auto Show Debut in New York
Luxury electric sedan completes first high speed stability test at 217 mph
New York, NY, April 13, 2017 – Lucid Motors made its global auto show debut today at the 117th-annual New York International Auto Show. The company showed the Lucid Air luxury electric sedan and also presented its Alpha Speed Car test vehicle, which had just completed its first high-speed stability test at 217 mph.
Lucid Air: Leading the Charge in Luxury Mobility
The Lucid Air was first unveiled in December 2016. The all-electric sedan combines forward- looking design with groundbreaking technology to establish an entirely new class of vehicle. Featuring full-size interior space in a mid-size exterior footprint, the autonomous-ready Air will be available with up to 400 miles of range and 1,000 horsepower.
The Air will be manufactured in Casa Grande, Arizona. The factory, first announced in November 2016, will come online in 2019 and build 10,000 vehicles in the first 12 months. By 2022 the factory is expected to employ 2,000 full-time employees and manufacture up to 130,000 vehicles annually.
The Lucid Air is priced from $52,500 after federal tax credits. The base Lucid Air will feature a 400-horsepower motor, rear-wheel drive, and a 240-mile range. Deliveries will begin in 2019. Customers can pre-order the Air at https://lucidmotors.com/car/reserve.
High Speed Testing: Evaluating Stability and Durability at 217 mph
In preparation for production, Lucid Air Alpha prototypes are undergoing a rigorous development program. Lucid has designated one of these test prototypes as a high-performance test vehicle and has installed a roll-cage for safety purposes. The Alpha Speed Car will be used for evaluating at-the-limit performance.
For the Alpha Speed Car’s first testing session, Lucid headed to TRC Ohio to use their 7.5-mile oval to evaluate high-speed behaviors, including vehicle stability and powertrain thermal management. The test, software-limited to 217mph (350km/h), was successful in demonstrating the capabilities of the car and in finding areas for improvement that could not be properly evaluated in static bench tests.
Real-world tests are an important part of the engineering process, allowing the team to correlate computer simulation models with real-world performance. The collected data will now be used to finesse thermal and aero computer simulations and to make further performance improvements that will be tested later this year at higher speeds.
A video of the test can be seen at https://youtu.be/7k03MH7ztUs.
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
