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Porsche will install 500 fast chargers in USA ahead of Mission E rollout
Porsche Cars North America has announced that it will be building a network of 500 fast chargers in the United States ahead of the upcoming all-electric Mission E rollout in 2019.
Porsche’s Mission E sedan, an electric car comparable to the Tesla Model S, is expected to reach American dealerships sometime next year, followed by the release of the Mission E Cross Turismo in 2020. Apart from these two vehicles, the German legacy carmaker is also considering the electrification of some of its most iconic brands, such as the Macan, Panamera, and the Cayenne.
In a statement to Automotive News, Porsche Cars of North America CEO Klaus Zellmer stated that the 800-volt fast chargers are designed to address the needs of Mission E owners in the region. According to the CEO, the fast charging network will aid in alleviating any range anxiety that owners of the all-electric Porsches might feel when traveling over long distances.
“If you want to buy that car, you want to know what happens if I go skiing and go further than 300 miles. What do I do? So we need to have answers for that,” Zellmer said.
Zellmer noted further that there’s a good chance that the fast chargers will only be used by Mission E owners who travel beyond the vehicle’s 301-mile range. According to the executive, around 80-90% of Mission E owners will likely charge their cars at home or at while at work.
If there is one thing that Zellmer is certain of, however, it is that the 500 fast chargers across the United States will not be free of charge, unlike Tesla’s Supercharger network, which is free to use for owners of the Model S and Model X. The Porsche Cars North America executive further stated that there would be several payment options for Mission E owners, though nothing is finalized yet at this time.
“We are pretty certain that it’s not free of charge. It’s too early to talk about how exactly that payment process for customers will work. There are various opportunities. You could buy a package all included for the car. It could be a membership card that you use. We’re not quite there yet,” the executive said.
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- A concept of the IONITY charging network.
Zellmer also told the publication that Porsche dealers in the United States could opt to build free fast-charging stations for their customers as a means to draw more traffic. The charging time for the vehicle, after all, could be a window of opportunity to engage with customers in dealership offerings. Zellmer, however, noted that dealerships who are interested in this option would have to invest in the construction of the charging stations.
“Dealership investment is not yet finalized, but it’s not a minor cost. It certainly is six-digit numbers that our dealers will have to take,” he said.
Apart from its fast-charging network in the United States, Porsche is also taking part in the construction of the Tesla Supercharger-rivalling IONITY network in Europe. Created by the Volkswagen Group, BMW Group, Daimler AG, and the Ford Motor Company, IONITY exceeds Tesla’s 120 kW Superchargers with its estimated 350 kW output, which is expected to give the Mission E up to 248 miles of range in as little as 15 minutes.
Just like the American fast chargers, using the IONITY network will not be free of charge. According to Porsche’s deputy chairman of the executive board Lutz Meschke, the rates for the upcoming ultra-fast charging network will be comparable to the current prices of gasoline.
Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.
Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.
Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.
He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.
Given that AI from 2 years ago feels so old that it should be in a museum, then obviously AI 2 years from now will be mind-blowing https://t.co/TcsKZ8o8OE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2026
This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:
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The progression in AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti (2023 – 2026) pic.twitter.com/VDv82mB5gs
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) February 10, 2026
This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.
Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.
Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.
But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.
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Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
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This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
