Lifestyle
My Friend has had 34 Cars. He’s only kept his Tesla Model 3.
My friend Travis has had 34 cars in 11 years of having a license. A Tesla Model 3 is the only one he has kept in his driveway for more than a few months. He’s now going on his fifth year of Tesla ownership.
In 2018, we were playing Xbox together when told me he was buying a Tesla Model 3. In the four years since, he has had numerous vehicles, from Jeeps to pickup trucks, to performance vehicles, to muscle cars.
“I have owned 34 vehicles. There have only been two vehicles I have kept for a decent amount of time,” he told me. “My first car was a Nissan Sentra, and my 2018 Tesla Model 3. I kept the Nissan for 2 years and the Tesla I had for four years. There have been many vehicles that I have purchased and sold in a short period of time. I have sold 3 vehicles before even getting them registered and getting a new title, so they were bought by me and sold by me within 4 days to 15 days.”
Our friendship has spanned many years. We grew up playing Little League together, and we eventually went from teammates to rivals competing for different high schools on the soccer field. Now that we’re both out of the military for him and college for me, we have transitioned to golf and we spend many weekends on the course together with other friends.
Credit: Joey Klender | Teslarati
The Tesla always comes up in conversation.
It only occurred to me recently that Trav gets rid of cars like I do socks. In fact, just four weekends ago, I met up with him for an early round of golf on a beautiful Sunday morning. He shows up in this red Corvette I’ve never seen and tells me he just picked it up from a man in Annapolis the previous day.
Fast-forward to last weekend: Travis sends me a Snapchat of the Corvette driving down the street. He had just sold it to someone else. He just loves driving different cars.
But the Tesla is a different story. Only getting a new Tesla because of the used car market right now, Travis has kept a Model 3 in his driveway for four years; a significantly longer period of time than any other car previously.
“One reason is the cost of ownership alone,” he said. “You save so much money in the Tesla. After four years of ownership, I never visited a service center, and the only maintenance I did was windshield washer fluid and two sets of tires in 92,000 miles. The App is super convenient for so many reasons. Being able to see where the car is parked in the middle of a city or a busy parking lot makes it very easy to find. Also, being able to heat the car or cool the car with the touch of one button on your phone is super nice, as well as venting the windows on a hot day.”
Travis traded in the 2018 LR AWD Model 3 earlier this year and picked up a 2022 Midnight Silver Metallic version in the same configuration.
“The only reason I traded my old Model 3 was just that the used car market is high right now,” he said. “If the market for used cars wasn’t so high, I would have kept it. I bought a 2022 Tesla Model 3 and picked a different color just to have some change. I always said I would never sell my Tesla unless it was for a newer one that was either faster, had more range, or someone was willing to pay a lot for it, and that’s what I did.”
As a realtor selling houses in our home state of Pennsylvania and in nearby Maryland, one of the biggest advantages of having the car is not having to spend money on gas. Prices in the U.S. are incredibly high, and in PA, they reached $5 a gallon for the first time in our lifetime. Even back in 2018, he was spending considerably less than others.
When Travis got out of the Air Force a few years ago and moved back to PA, he drove the Tesla here. “I drove my Model 3 from Colorado to Pennsylvania and spent $47 at Superchargers along the way. My friend making the same trip spent $527 on gas.”
Now that he’s a relator and is driving around for open houses or to close a deal, the savings alone are making his job even easier and less financially stressful.
As for other drivers, Trav says an EV is absolutely the best option for those who are in the market for a new car. “I ABSOLUTELY would encourage others to purchase an EV. The best part about all the trips I have taken: to Maine, to Tennessee, and to the beach, is I do not even plan the trip out. I just get in my Model 3 and put the address in, and start driving. The screen tells me where to stop to charge, which normally is no more than a half mile out of the way.”
As for those who are skeptical of whether the Model 3 will stick around in Trav’s repertoire, I wouldn’t count on it going anywhere anytime soon. “I will always have one,” he said.
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.
For a century, the car has asked the same thing of its owner, which is basically to pay attention. Even the best ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft only moved the problem into someone else’s hands. You stopped driving, but you still sat in a stranger’s car, while half listening, and wondering whether to take a phone call in the car without being rude. The Cybercab has no wheel, no pedals and no driver. With Grok @bot now live inside it, it becomes something else entirely, and I think that matters more than the fleet count that everyone is tracking.
Grok @bot is an agent, not a voice assistant. A rider signs in once, and from then on can say what they need and watch it happen. Order dinner from a favorite restaurant. Fill the grocery cart. Move money, answer email, adjust a calendar, push a work project forward. Tesla engineer Yun-Ta Tsai confirmed it is enabled across every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y fleet, and Tesla’s own pitch is that Full Self-Driving handles the commute while Grok handles the errands.
Think about what that does to a thirty minute ride. Uber sells you a trip, while Waymo sells you the same trip in a more private setting. Tesla is selling the thirty minutes themselves, returned to you with an assistant attached. Errands that used to eat a Saturday get done between pickup and drop off. The ride stops being dead time between two places and becomes a place of its own.
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
Best of all, your Bots follow you into any Cybercab, and presumably your own Tesla, then logs you out automatically when you step out. Anyone can bolt a chatbot onto a screen, but much harder to own the vehicle, the autonomy stack and the assistant at once. It also quietly ties SpaceX’s Super Intelligence business to Tesla’s fleet, after Tesla converted its xAI stake into SpaceX equity. The relationship between those two companies is getting harder to describe as separate.
This is also where the hard questions start, because an agent that can spend your money in a vehicle other people also ride in needs some answers. How does it handle a voice it shouldn’t trust? What gets recorded, who can see it, and for how long? What happens when a rider leaves halfway through a task?
If Tesla gets those answers right, the scoreboard changes. We have been counting Cybercabs and wait times. The more telling number may be what riders accomplish per trip. That is data almost no one else will ever have, and it is the real reason to watch Grok @bot.
What do you think? Leave me a comment.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s mirrorless Cybercab will give riders a visibility upgrade
Tesla engineer confirms Cybercab update letting riders pull up rear and repeater cameras on demand.
Tesla is working on a Cybercab update that would let passengers pull up the vehicle’s rear and side cameras on demand, and the request came straight from a rider.
The exchange played out on X late Friday. Cybercab rider Dan Burkland shared photos of the two-seater’s cabin screen after an evening ride, praised the UI team’s work, and left one request: let riders open the rear and repeater cameras whenever they want, “especially for peace of mind.” Tesla UI software engineer Evan (@CarCoder) answered with two words: “In development.”
The Tesla UI team absolutely crushed it with the infotainment software. Nicely done @CarCoder!
One feature request: Allow folks to pull up the rear & repeater cameras on demand. This would be great especially for peace of mind. https://t.co/mNAOSLx6pE
— Dan Burkland (@DBurkland) October 10, 2026
The idea fits a pattern Teslarati has tracked since public rides began. Days after paid Cybercab service opened in Austin, Tesla sent riders a survey that asked them to rate the touchscreen, the app and the cabin, and to pick the features they wanted most. We reported on that survey in September, and a camera view is the kind of small software change Tesla can push quickly if riders keep asking.
It also speaks to something unique about the vehicle. With no steering wheel, no pedals and no driver, passengers have no mirror to check and no way to see behind them. The hardware is clearly built for camera awareness, from the repeater cameras to the rear camera. Letting a passenger look through those same cameras would give a nervous first time rider a way to confirm what is around the car.
The timing matters because the fleet is growing fast. Tesla’s Robotaxi account said on Saturday that more than 300 Cybercabs are now serving Austin, an eightfold increase in 30 days, and Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy named Dallas as the next city. More cars and more cities mean more people riding in a driverless vehicle for the first time, which is exactly when small trust features carry weight.
For now, the feature is confirmed only as in development. If Tesla follows its usual pattern with Cybercab software, riders could see it appear in a point release without any announcement, and Teslarati will watch for it.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s surprise addition to the X Takeover lineup has fans talking
Elon Musk will join Saturday’s X Takeover at Giga Texas for a live virtual interview.
Elon Musk will join X Takeover at Giga Texas on Saturday for a live virtual interview, according to Sawyer Merritt, who shared the news late Thursday. Musk will not be on stage in Austin. The conversation is set to stream for free on the @teslaownersSV account on X.
Organizers had kept expectations in check. In a September update, Tesla Owners Silicon Valley said Musk had appeared at the event twice before but was not promising a third appearance, even as fans hoped he would walk the Giga Texas grounds in person. A virtual spot matches 2024, when Musk gave a surprise interview of about an hour to the crowd in San Luis Obispo, as Teslarati reported at the time.
Wasn’t expecting this 🫡
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) October 9, 2026
This year’s edition is a first in several ways. It is the first X Takeover held outside California and the first at a Tesla facility, with tickets selling out in eight days. Tesla provides the venue, but the event is produced independently by Tesla Owners Silicon Valley. The main event runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. CT, followed by a drone and light show at 9 p.m. Maye Musk is the keynote speaker, Franz von Holzhausen is set for a virtual keynote, and Nicki Minaj is the special guest. Joe Tegtmeyer, whose drone footage Teslarati used to track the Optimus factory steel frame at Giga Texas, is also on the speaker list.
Musk’s interview topics have not been revealed, but the backdrop is busy. Tesla doubled its Cybercab fleet in Austin in late September, and last week Musk explained why Robotaxi hours only moved from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m.. Merritt also reported Thursday that Texas DMV records now show 319 registered Cybercabs, up from 169. NHTSA’s deadline for Tesla’s sworn answers on Cybercab certification is October 30, and Tesla reports third quarter earnings on October 21.
Fans who cannot make it to Austin can watch the livestream on X. Musk tends to say more in unscripted settings than he does in prepared remarks, which is the reason this one is worth having open on Saturday.
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