Lifestyle
Mileage on a Tesla is a Badge of Honor
When my husband told me that his meeting in out of state last week was postponed, I was a little disappointed. You see it would be that meeting that would get our Tesla over the 20,000 mile mark just in time for our one year anniversary of ownership on December 4th.
Fortunately, it was rescheduled to today. For one fleeting moment last night, I mentioned how it is just a little bit crazy that he would be driving more than 3 hours each way to attend a 1.5 hour meeting. He reminded me that I was happy about the trip because of the odometer goal. This morning I received a text message from him:
“You should do a post on how owning a Tesla makes you want to drive more”
I told him that it’s already been done. Nearly every owner I’ve ever spoken to has said they now drive more, even so far as making excuses to run errands or hit a new Supercharger. But then I thought about it for a minute and asked myself why. I came to several conclusions.
Mileage in the years before EV
In the “ICE Age” of cars, mileage is a bad thing. Used car ads tout low mileage or try to justify higher numbers with claims of mostly highway driving. Gasoline powered cars have thousands of parts that make up major systems such as the engine, fuel system, drive train, exhaust and transmission. Many of these parts have a life expectancy so if you put a lot of miles on your cars or buy used, you can expect to have to replace a water or fuel pump, belts, a muffler or even a whole transmission. What makes a gasoline engine so inefficient is heat loss. When you consider all that heat combined with so many small parts, some of which are rubber, it starts to make sense when you hear someone dreading their annual inspection because they wonder what part(s) they’re going to have to pay to replace in order to get the car to pass. It also starts to make sense when you learn that traditional car dealerships make more profit on parts and services than they do on sales. Gas cars are complex machines and the more you use them, the higher your risk of something going wrong.
Mileage beyond necessity
How many miles you drive on a daily basis related to your work or school routine is a very personal thing. When we got our car, my husband’s daily work commute was 22 miles round trip. It is even shorter now. Mine, which the Tesla makes once per week, is 32. One gentleman I chatted with a bit last year when we were both waiting for our cars to be built drives well over 100 miles each day. Some owners are retired. Some are medical professionals that work fewer than five days per week. For that reason, the total amount of miles you rack up can be very different than someone else. Yet for so many owners that I’ve spoken to, it is their non-commute mileage that is off the carts. They actually want to drive. The car is enjoyable, quiet, comfortable and fast. The internet radio keeps you company. And unlike the gasoline cars we’ve left behind, we are proud and almost eager to collect more miles.
Mileage is a badge of honor
I’ve come to the realization that mileage on a Tesla is a badge of honor. For one, it sort of blows detractors out of the water. Find me 10 people that think they “can’t” own a Tesla for a reason other than cost, and I’ll prove to 9 of them that they are wrong. Secondly, driving so many gas free miles is a fun way to stick it to big business – both oil and the auto industry as a whole. This is especially true in those states that ban Tesla’s direct sales model. A third reason is psychological. A small survey showed that many Tesla owners would not have otherwise chosen a car with a price tag close to that of their Model S. The more gas free miles you drive, the more you can justify the cost. In most cases, the cost of electricity at home is significantly less per mile than gas. In the case of long distance trips on the free super charger network, your fuel cost saving is 100%. (Add in a mileage reimbursement for business, and you may actually make a profit to take your Tesla while saving your company money compared to the cost of taxis and trains.)
It won’t be long before our Tesla, delivered in December 2014, has more miles on the odometer than our Hyundai, which was purchased in December 2012. It’s no wonder because aside from the fact that owning the Tesla makes us want to drive more, it also makes us want to drive the Hyundai less. Only one time in a whole year did we choose to drive that car. We had just washed and detailed the Tesla for my first ever local car show entry the following morning and didn’t want to get it dirty. Otherwise, I see no reason the two of us will ever be in the Hyundai together again.
How many miles does your Tesla have? Leave me a comment below!
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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.
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