News
Rivian showroom to open in luxury Chicago neighborhood
Rivian plans to open its first showroom in Chicago’s Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is marketed as an area for luxury lovers, befitting Rivian’s brand goals.
Rivian will open a showroom at 871 N. Rush St. in Chicago’s Gold Coast area. The EV automaker initially planned to open a showroom in the Fulton Market district a few years ago but backed out of the deal for undisclosed reasons. Its current location in the Gold Coast area might be more fitting, though.
“The Gold Coast is a luxury lover’s haven. Charming homes on picture-perfect streets, high-end boutiques, and restaurants favored by celebrities past and present all give this neighborhood its star power,” stated Choose Chicago.
Rivian aspires to provide customers with the best off-roading, outdoor experience in the comfort of modern society through its R1T and R1S electric vehicles EVs. In the past, RJ Scaringe stated that R1 EVs would have a “Patagonia-like feel of enabling adventure.”
The Patagonia brand is well-known for providing durable equipment for outdoor explorers. A pair of shorts at Patagonia can range from $55 to $65 or more. Despite its premium price, however, Patagonia’s products are well-loved by its consumers. Statista estimates that about 15% of outdoor fashion users in the US use Patagonia products.
While Rivian’s Gold Coast showroom is already impressive, it isn’t finished with Chicago yet. In a statement to CoStar News, the company noted it was “still exploring our options” for another space in Chicago. It should be noted that Rivian already has a service center located west of Fulton Market at 2033 W. Walnut St.
Rivian is still ramping up its first two consumer vehicles, the R1T pickup truck and the R1S SUV. Plans are also underway to release the R2 platform, which is expected to be more affordable. Last month, Rivian also announced that it would adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS) for its vehicles. Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) has gone live with a link to its Q2 2023 earnings call. All eyes are on Tesla’s electric vehicle margins in the second quarter, as the company achieved record delivery numbers following the adoption of aggressive pricing strategies.
Similar to previous earnings calls, Tesla is also accepting questions from retail and institutional investors that would be asked during the session’s Q&A portion. A link to Say.com’s platform, which allows TSLA investors to post their inquiries to Tesla, is included in the Q3 2023 earnings call live-streams description on YouTube.
Tesla shares are seeing momentum this week after the company announced during the weekend that the first production Cybertruck has been manufactured at Gigafactory Texas. The Cybertruck is highly-anticipated, with estimates suggesting that the vehicle has about 1.7 million pre-orders as of earlier this year.
The electric vehicle maker’s second-quarter production and delivery results were also impressive. Tesla produced nearly 480,000 vehicles and delivered over 466,000 cars from April to June. The lion’s share of these sales were from the Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover, the company’s two mainstream vehicles.
But while Tesla was able to sell a record number of vehicles worldwide in the second quarter, the company also adopted an aggressive pricing strategy that is expected to affect some of the company’s margins. Thus, while Tesla sold more vehicles than ever, its profit margin per vehicle sold likely declined in Q2.
Tesla is expected to post its financial results for the second quarter of 2023 after markets close on Wednesday, July 19, 2023. The actual earnings call, livestreamed in the link below, is expected to start at 4:30 p.m. Central Time (5:30 p.m. Eastern Time).
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Tesla Robotaxi ride-hailing without a Safety Monitor is proving to be a difficult task, according to some riders who made the journey to Austin to attempt to ride in one of its vehicles that has zero supervision.
Last week, Tesla officially removed Safety Monitors from some — not all — of its Robotaxi vehicles in Austin, Texas, answering skeptics who said the vehicles still needed supervision to operate safely and efficiently.
BREAKING: Tesla launches public Robotaxi rides in Austin with no Safety Monitor
Tesla aimed to remove Safety Monitors before the end of 2025, and it did, but only to company employees. It made the move last week to open the rides to the public, just a couple of weeks late to its original goal, but the accomplishment was impressive, nonetheless.
However, the small number of Robotaxis that are operating without Safety Monitors has proven difficult to hail for a ride. David Moss, who has gained notoriety recently as the person who has traveled over 10,000 miles in his Tesla on Full Self-Driving v14 without any interventions, made it to Austin last week.
He has tried to get a ride in a Safety Monitor-less Robotaxi for the better part of four days, and after 38 attempts, he still has yet to grab one:
Wow just wow!
It’s 8:30PM, 29° out ice storm hailing & Tesla Robotaxi service has turned back on!
Waymo is offline & vast majority of humans are home in the storm
Ride 38 was still supervised but by far most impressive yet pic.twitter.com/1aUnJkcYm8
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) January 25, 2026
Tesla said last week that it was rolling out a controlled test of the Safety Monitor-less Robotaxis. Ashok Elluswamy, who heads the AI program at Tesla, confirmed that the company was “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader Robotaxi fleet with Safety Monitors,” and that “the ratio will increase over time.”
This is a good strategy that prioritizes safety and keeps the company’s controlled rollout at the forefront of the Robotaxi rollout.
However, it will be interesting to see how quickly the company can scale these completely monitor-less rides. It has proven to be extremely difficult to get one, but that is understandable considering only a handful of the cars in the entire Austin fleet are operating with no supervision within the vehicle.
Tesla has given its biggest hint that Full Self-Driving in Europe is imminent, as a new feature seems to show that the company is preparing for frequent border crossings.
Tesla owner and influencer BLKMDL3, also known as Zack, recently took his Tesla to the border of California and Mexico at Tijuana, and at the international crossing, Full Self-Driving showed an interesting message: “Upcoming country border — FSD (Supervised) will become unavailable.”
FSD now shows a new message when approaching an international border crossing.
Stayed engaged the whole way as we crossed the border and worked great in Mexico! pic.twitter.com/bDzyLnyq0g
— Zack (@BLKMDL3) January 26, 2026
Due to regulatory approvals, once a Tesla operating on Full Self-Driving enters a new country, it is required to comply with the laws and regulations that are applicable to that territory. Even if legal, it seems Tesla will shut off FSD temporarily, confirming it is in a location where operation is approved.
This is something that will be extremely important in Europe, as crossing borders there is like crossing states in the U.S.; it’s pretty frequent compared to life in America, Canada, and Mexico.
Tesla has been working to get FSD approved in Europe for several years, and it has been getting close to being able to offer it to owners on the continent. However, it is still working through a lot of the red tape that is necessary for European regulators to approve use of the system on their continent.
This feature seems to be one that would be extremely useful in Europe, considering the fact that crossing borders into other countries is much more frequent than here in the U.S., and would cater to an area where approvals would differ.
Tesla has been testing FSD in Spain, France, England, and other European countries, and plans to continue expanding this effort. European owners have been fighting for a very long time to utilize the functionality, but the red tape has been the biggest bottleneck in the process.
Tesla Europe builds momentum with expanding FSD demos and regional launches
Tesla operates Full Self-Driving in the United States, China, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship V3 gets launch date update from Elon Musk
The first flight of Starship Version 3 and its new Raptor V3 engines could happen as early as March.
Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX’s next Starship launch, Flight 12, is expected in about six weeks. This suggests that the first flight of Starship Version 3 and its new Raptor V3 engines could happen as early as March.
In a post on X, Elon Musk stated that the next Starship launch is in six weeks. He accompanied his announcement with a photo that seemed to have been taken when Starship’s upper stage was just about to separate from the Super Heavy Booster. Musk did not state whether SpaceX will attempt to catch the Super Heavy Booster during the upcoming flight.
The upcoming flight will mark the debut of Starship V3. The upgraded design includes the new Raptor V3 engine, which is expected to have nearly twice the thrust of the original Raptor 1, at a fraction of the cost and with significantly reduced weight. The Starship V3 platform is also expected to be optimized for manufacturability.
The Starship V3 Flight 12 launch timeline comes as SpaceX pursues an aggressive development cadence for the fully reusable launch system. Previous iterations of Starship have racked up a mixed but notable string of test flights, including multiple integrated flight tests in 2025.
Interestingly enough, SpaceX has teased an aggressive timeframe for Starship V3’s first flight. Way back in late November, SpaceX noted on X that it will be aiming to launch Starship V3’s maiden flight in the first quarter of 2026. This was despite setbacks like a structural anomaly on the first V3 booster during ground testing.
“Starship’s twelfth flight test remains targeted for the first quarter of 2026,” the company wrote in its post on X.
Tesla Robotaxi ride-hailing without a Safety Monitor proves to be difficult
Tesla gives its biggest hint that Full Self-Driving in Europe is imminent
