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Porsche premieres Macan EV: 161 MPH top speed, 3.1s 0-60, 100 kWh battery

Credit: Porsche

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Porsche unveiled its Macan EV today, bringing its second all-electric car to market and releasing some interesting details regarding its performance and power.

Ten years after the launch of the Macan, Porsche is bringing the vehicle in what it calls “a bold new direction.”

Porsche has kept a lot of the same design features with the EV version of the Macan, hoping to build upon its already successful status as a mainstay in the company’s lineup.

“Our aim is to offer the sportiest model in its segment with the all-electric Macan. In many ways, we are taking a very successful SUV to a new level,” Jörg Kerner, VP of the Macan for Porsche, said.

Porsche confirms Macan will go all-electric, production to follow Taycan, Cross Turismo

Initially, Porsche plans to bring two Macan configurations to market: the Macan 4 and Macan Turbo, both offering different performance metrics.

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  • Porsche Macan 4
    • 300 KW | 402 HP
    • 479 lb-ft torque
    • 0-60 MPH in 4.9 seconds
    • 136 MPH Top Speed
  • Porsche Macan Turbo
    • 470 KW | 630 HP
    • 833 lb-ft torque
    • 0-60 MPH in 3.1 seconds
    • 161 MPH Top Speed

Premium Platform Electric with 800-volt Architecture

A lithium-ion battery with a gross capacity of 100 kWh and 95 kWh of usable energy powers Porsche’s new Premium Platform Electric with an 800-volt architecture. This is the first time the automaker is using this on an EV.

It has a DC charging capability of 270 kW, and Porsche said the Macan will be capable of charging from 10 to 80 percent in just 21 minutes under ideal conditions.

It also explains that, at 400-volt charging stations, a high-voltage switch in the battery pack will enable bank charging by splitting the 800-volt battery into two batteries, effectively creating two 400-volt batteries. This will keep charging efficiency at a maximum without using an additional lithium-ion booster.

Additionally, the Macan EV will use regenerative braking that allows up to 240 kW of power to be recuperated through the electric motors while driving.

Premium Handling

When Porsche initially developed the Macan, it wanted to keep things simple but still allow the vehicle to encapsulate what it calls “quintessential Porsche driving dynamics and a characteristic steering feel.”

This was also put into focus with the Macan EV.

“Thanks to its particularly sporty seat position and low center of gravity, as well as its impressive driving dynamics and steering precision, the new Macan delivers a real sports car feeling,” Kerner adds.

Both configurations of the Macan EV will feature all-wheel-drive with two electric motors. It is also equipped with the Porsche Traction Management system (ePTM), which operates around five times faster than a conventional all-wheel-drive system, and can respond to wheelspin within 10 milliseconds.

Porsche Torque Vectoring Plus, or PTV Plus, is an electronically controlled differential lock on the rear axle. This helps improve traction, driving stability, and lateral dynamics.

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Spacious Interior and Increased Room for Luggage

The Macan was designed with practicality in mind. Porsche details that, depending on the configuration and equipment fitted, the capacity behind the rear-seat bench is up to 18 cubic feet.

The frunk also features 2.9 cubic feet of room, which increases the total space in the vehicle to 4.4 cubic feet greater than the previous Macan model.

High-Tech Driver Experience

A free-standing 12.6-inch curved instrument cluster is complemented by a 10.9-inch central display.

The Macan EV also features, for the first time, a passenger option to view information, adjust settings on the infotainment system, or stream video content while the car is being driven on its own 10.9-inch screen, which is optional.

The Porsche Driver Experience, however, features a head-up display with augmented reality technology. It also features navigation arrows which are visually integrated into the real world.

Both Android Automotive OS and Apple CarPlay are featured in the Macan EV’s new-generation infotainment system. Porsche Communication Management will allow the driver to say “Hey Porsche” to access anything from suggested routes, charging stops, and other crucial information.

Pricing and Availability

Porsche plans to bring the Macan to market within the second half of the year, but customers can order it immediately.

The Macan 4 is priced at just $78,800, while the Turbo configuration will be $105,300. Each price does not include the $1,650 delivery, processing, and handling fee.

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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.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront

SpaceX now pitches Starfall missions with 1,000 kg payloads, weeks of microgravity, and Starlink connectivity.

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An artist’s illustration of a SpaceX Starfall capsule reentering Earth’s atmosphere. (Image: SpaceX)

SpaceX has put up a dedicated commercial page for Starfall, its disk shaped reentry capsule, laying out for the first time what customers actually get when they book a flight. The page, live at spacex.com/starfall, pitches “affordable, routine access to microgravity” and invites companies to get in touch about flying manufacturing, research or testing payloads.

The specs are short and specific. Each Starfall mission carries up to 1,000 kg of payload, supplies 1 kW of power and connects through an Ethernet interface. Mission length is tailored to the customer, and the payload stays online the entire time through Starlink, which means researchers can pull data from an experiment while it is still in orbit instead of waiting for splashdown.

SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space

SpaceX is aiming the service at three markets. Biomedical customers are told they can grow stem cell organoids, replacement tissue and layered biomaterials. Pharmaceutical companies are pitched on protein and small molecule drug crystals, which form smaller and more uniform shapes without gravity driven convection. Materials science rounds out the list, with semiconductors and other next generation materials grown in vacuum and microgravity.

The page also makes clear which rocket SpaceX is counting on. “By launching on Starship, Starfall brings a reliable and scalable cadence previously unavailable to the market,” the company wrote, contrasting weeks of continuous microgravity with the seconds offered by drop towers and parabolic flights. No price or first operational flight date is listed.

The commercial push is a sharp turn from how Starfall started. SpaceX said almost nothing about the capsule ahead of its first flight in June, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings describing a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that can return 2,200 pounds of cargo. By its second flight on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare in October, Starfall was listed by name on the mission page, though SpaceX still did not say what it carried.

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Customers appear to be lining up. SpaceX said in its third quarter results that it signed three commercial Starfall missions during the quarter. On the earnings call, President Gwynne Shotwell described the capsule as providing “routine relatively low cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes,” and said the three new missions would fly on Starship.

The branding effort extends past the website. SpaceX added a Starfall T-shirt to its online store on Monday as part of a batch of new merchandise, giving the program a place next to Starship, Starlink and Starshield in the company’s lineup.

The move also puts SpaceX in more direct competition with companies it launches. Varda Space Industries, which has built much of the in-space manufacturing market so far, flew its W-Series 7 capsule on the same Bandwagon-5 mission as Starfall in October. Varda’s capsules are roughly three times smaller than Starfall, and SpaceX controls the ride to orbit for both.

Starfall’s near term cadence depends on Starship. SpaceX is preparing for Flight 15 after completing static fires of Ship 42 and its Super Heavy booster in late October, and is aiming to catch both stages with the launch tower on that flight.

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Elon Musk

Grok Bot users hit with weekly limits early, Elon Musk explains what happened

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Credit: Grok Bot

Elon Musk said weeks ago during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call that the company’s Grok Bot, its autonomous AI Agent platform, was showing “the fastest growth of a product” that he’d ever seen in his life.

Now, SpaceXSI is scaling back Grok Bot users’ weekly limits, much to the surprise of those who have relied on it to take away monotonous tasks in their lives.

Elon Musk’s terse November 1 reply on X captured a sharp tension in the early days of agentic AI. Responding to a user who asked for a Grok Bot usage reset after hitting 100 percent with four days still left on the weekly cycle, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”

The post arrived amid a wave of similar complaints from paying subscribers whose meters had jumped unexpectedly toward or to the limit, sometimes overnight and with little corresponding activity. It also stood in clear contrast to statements Musk had made only days and weeks earlier.

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On the SpaceX third-quarter earnings call in mid-to-late October, Musk had described Grok Bot in almost the opposite terms. He called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and said he had “never seen anything grow this fast.”

Company figures put paid weekly users at roughly 800,000 earlier in the month, more than doubling over the prior period. Daily active users had climbed from under 100,000 in early September to over 600,000 by late October.

Musk emphasized that the product has no free tier and that users appear to be getting real value beyond what they pay. In other remarks, he noted that usage per user was rising rather than declining, the opposite of the usual decay pattern for new software.

Grok Bot, launched around August, functions as an always-available agent with its own persistent cloud computer; it can schedule, research, shop, browse, and execute multi-step workflows even after the user steps away. Access is bundled into X subscription tiers (roughly $30, $100, and $200 per month) and certain Cursor plans, drawing from shared weekly usage pools whose exact sizes have not been publicly detailed.

The economics of that model are what Musk’s November 1 post put in the spotlight. Agentic systems burn far more compute than ordinary chatbot exchanges. Each task can trigger repeated model calls, tool use, web actions, and sustained background work.

When growth is as rapid as Musk celebrated, the absolute compute bill scales quickly even if average revenue per user stays fixed under flat monthly subscriptions. Industry observers noted the opportunity cost as well: the same GPUs can be rented to other AI labs at higher rates.

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A simple back-of-the-envelope comparison circulating after the post illustrated the gap: if every reported daily user paid the top tier, annualized subscription revenue would still be modest relative to the scale of compute infrastructure SpaceX is building and leasing to companies like Anthropic.

Some users also reported possible dashboard anomalies around the same period, though Musk’s framing treated the underlying cost-revenue imbalance as the core issue rather than a pure metering glitch.

The juxtaposition is the core of this exchange. Within roughly two weeks of publicly framing Grok Bot as an unprecedented success with strong unit economics and no free tier, Musk acknowledged that serving the same product had become unsustainable relative to the revenue it generates.

For the broader industry, the episode underscores a structural challenge of the agent era: demand is real and growing faster than many expected, yet the cost of fulfilling that demand through always-on, multi-step agents can outrun subscription pricing before companies can adjust limits, introduce metered billing, or raise prices.

Musk’s reply did not promise an immediate reset or higher allowances; it simply stated the constraint. In doing so, it supplied a rare, explicit public data point on the unit economics of a high-profile AI agent just as adoption numbers were still being celebrated as the fastest in Musk’s experience.

The tension between rapid, paid growth and the compute required to deliver it is now on the record.

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Tesla owners who tap Emergency Drive Away for fun are in for a surprise

Tapping Activate on Tesla’s Emergency Drive Away reportedly triggers a $539 service bill without moving.

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Tesla owners who press Activate on Emergency Drive Away may be on the hook for a service bill even if their car never leaves the Supercharger stall.

Yaro, who posts about Tesla service cases on X as @Tutrifour, said a customer called after tapping Activate while still plugged into a Supercharger. The owner was about to pull away, remembered the cable was still connected and stopped. The car never moved, but the touchscreen showed a red alert reading “Emergency Drive Away has been activated” with “Service is required” underneath. A Service Mode screenshot showed the active alert BMS_a228_EmergencyDriveAwayServiceRequired, which Yaro said only Tesla Service can clear.


The cost of clearing it was the bigger surprise. “Don’t press Activate on the new Emergency Drive Away feature on your Tesla because service charges $539 to inspect the charge port and to clear the alert. Yes, even if you didn’t move the car an inch,” Yaro wrote.  The $539 figure comes from that single case, and Tesla has not published a set price for the inspection or commented on the post. Yaro also noted that the car would still charge with the alert on screen.

Tesla launched Emergency Drive Away on October 1 with software update 2026.38.3, letting drivers pull away from a U.S. Supercharger with the cable still attached, as Teslarati reported. To use it, a driver shifts into Drive while connected, holds the brake and taps Activate. The prompt warns that driving with the cable connected will damage the vehicle and the Supercharger, and that short camera recordings will be shared with Tesla.

Tesla Charging has been clear about what follows a real activation. Repairs to a Supercharger stall can run up to $25,000 depending on the site, a service visit for the car’s charge port is mandatory, and deliberate misuse “will invoke additional penalties.” What the company had not spelled out is that the service requirement is triggered the moment Activate is pressed, not the moment the cable breaks away.

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From an engineering standpoint, that is the cautious choice. Once Activate is pressed, the car cannot be sure the charge port latch was not stressed, so flagging it for inspection removes the guesswork. It also means the button carries a price on its own, which is a stronger deterrent against casual use than any warning screen.


The report follows the feature’s first known real world use, when a driver in Austin during F1 weekend appeared to trigger it by accident and dragged the Supercharger cable along with the car. The Reddit user who filmed it said the driver seemed to have only half read the prompts.

For owners, the takeaway is to treat the red prompt as a stop sign. If it appears after shifting out of Park by mistake, shift back and unplug the normal way from the touchscreen, the Tesla app or the button on the charge handle. Activate is meant for moments when staying at the stall is the bigger risk, and Tesla is now pricing it that way.

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