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How Starlink & T-Mobile’s partnership will impact 5G for the better for AI cameras
Starlink and T-Mobile’s partnership will be revolutionary for cellular service and Smarter AI CEO Chris Piche had some thoughts on how the new partnership will impact 5G capability for the automotive industry.
Chris, who has created services including AT&T TV, BBM Video, Poly Video, and STUN/TURN/ICE shared his thoughts on the effect of 5G on vehicles and telecommunications in an interview with Teslarati.
AI Cameras, Tesla, Starlink & autonomous vehicles
Before founding Smarter AI, the Top 40 under 40 entrepreneur’s company created a technology that BlackBerry licensed to enable voice and video calling. This gave Chris a front-row seat to witness the speed at which technology can transform markets.
Smarter AI is a software platform for artificial intelligence cameras.
“Smarter AI is to cameras as Android and iOS are to phones,” he told me. The company’s first vertical market is focusing on transportation. Vehicle camera systems such as dash cams or other camera systems for larger vehicles are in this market.
“The connection here with Tesla, Starlink, and T-Mobile is all around autonomous transportation. Today’s autonomous transportation whether it’s in Tesla or another kind of vehicle all relies on line of sight situational awareness. In Tesla’s case, they rely on some cases exclusively and other cases primarily on cameras and computer vision to try to understand what’s happening around the car.”
“Many of their competitors use LiDAR and don’t rely on cameras. But in both cases, it’s all based on line of sight. What they can actually see in a straight line.”
Seeing beyond the line of sight
Chris told me that one of the new technologies that Smarter AI and other companies are developing is called vehicle to vehicle (V2V) or vehicle to everything else (V2X).
“These technologies enable cars to see beyond line of sight. Imagine you’re coming to an intersection and are planning to take a turn.”
Instead of waiting to see what’s ahead of you on the street, you’re turning on to, the technology will tell you exactly what is ahead. There could be a stopped car, a pedestrian about to jaywalk, or some type of temporary obstruction that you are unaware of.
“Imagine if there was a camera system located at the intersection. Imagine that as your vehicle is approaching that intersection, your vehicle could communicate with the camera and the camera could tell your vehicle that there’s some sort of obstacle.”
An autonomous vehicle would use this information to determine whether or not it can make that turn. This technology, Chris told me, relies on high-capacity and high-availability communications networks such as 5G.
Starlink & T-Mobile’s partnership could help with the challenges of implementing V2V and V2X
“One of the challenges with implementing technologies like V2V or V2X on top of 5G is that 5G deployments tend to be pretty good and getting better in large urban areas.”
5G is pretty spotty in Baton Rouge and personally, 4G LTE works faster than 5G does for me although there’s a tower across the street from me. Chris, who is in Las Vegas, said that the coverage is pretty good for his friend with AT&T. He doesn’t have AT&T and his coverage is pretty spotty like mine is.
“But this agreement with Starlink and T-Mobile has the promise or the potential to either eliminate or significantly reduce the spottiness in the 5G coverage and that will enable technologies that are designed on top of 5G such as V2V and V2X to work either more reliably in urban areas where 5G is already available but is a little bit spotty,” he said.
“It would also enable these technologies to work in other areas where there is no 5G. We think this is a really significant announcement in terms of the promise of autonomous transportation and bringing it much closer to being a reality.”
How V2V and V2X could improve Tesla’s Autopilot
Chris told me he’s been using Tesla’s Autopilot for around five years.
“It’s so good. It’s to the point that for the things it can see, it’s a way better driver than I am,” he said adding that when he drives for over a couple of minutes, he engages Autopilot. However, there are a couple of things that it lacks.
“It can’t see that far ahead and it lacks context. Sometimes, if there’s a car making a turn in front of my car, the Autopilot won’t understand the context that maybe this other car is momentarily in front of mine. And if I was driving, I’d keep driving. I wouldn’t take my foot off the accelerator or slam on the brakes unless I could see that something was going wrong with the turn that the other car was making.”
One way to improve Autopilot is through V2V or V2X, Chris explained.
“In V2V, my car would talk to the car that’s making the turn in front of me and they would orchestrate the speed and direction of both of the cars so that the car in front of me could make its turn and my car could continue driving without slamming on the brakes.”
“With V2X, that would enable my car to talk to the cameras, traffic lights, and intersections to gain situational awareness about either other cars that aren’t equipped with the same technology or about other objects such as bicycles, pedestrians, or other obstacles on the street.”
Note: Johnna is a Tesla shareholder and supports its mission.
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SpaceX set to launch astronauts and a classified Falcon Heavy mission on the same day
SpaceX plans three launches Thursday, including Crew-13 astronauts and Falcon Heavy’s first classified NRO mission.
SpaceX is lining up one of the busiest single days in its history, and the company offered a preview on Wednesday morning with a simple post on X: “Sunrise at pad 40.” The video and photos show Falcon 9 standing at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, roughly a day before it is scheduled to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.
That launch is only the first of three SpaceX missions planned for Thursday, October 1, across both coasts.
Sunrise at pad 40 pic.twitter.com/J7Qme4VvIX
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 30, 2026
Crew-13 is targeting liftoff at 11:10 a.m. ET, with a backup opportunity Friday at 10:47 a.m. ET. NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins will command the mission, with NASA’s Luke Delaney as pilot and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov serving as mission specialists. According to NASA, Dragon is set to dock with the forward port of the station’s Harmony module around 8 p.m. ET, less than nine hours after launch. Watkins is the only member of the crew who has flown before, and Kutryk will become the first Canadian to reach orbit through NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
The Falcon 9 booster is flying for the third time after supporting Crew-12 and a Starlink mission, and it will attempt a landing at Landing Zone 40 beside the pad. That site made its debut in February when the Crew-12 booster touched down there, as Teslarati reported at the time. Crew-13 will relieve the Crew-12 astronauts, who have been aboard the station since the middle of February.
On the West Coast, another Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in a window running from 2:18 to 3:16 p.m. ET, a flight NASASpaceflight lists as a Transporter rideshare mission.
The day is set to close at 11:53 p.m. ET, when Falcon Heavy launches from Launch Complex 39A with NROL-97, the first National Reconnaissance Office payload ever to fly on the rocket. SpaceX rolled the vehicle out to the pad Tuesday night. Its two side boosters, which previously flew GOES-U, ViaSat-3 F3 and NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, will return to Landing Zones 1 and 2, while a new center core will be expended in the Atlantic. The Roman launch took place on August 30, so NROL-97 will come barely a month later as Falcon Heavy’s third flight of 2026 and 14th overall.
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
If all three Florida boosters land as planned, it would be the first time the Space Coast has seen landings at LZ-40, LZ-1 and LZ-2 on the same day, according to the Orlando Sentinel, which has warned residents in Brevard, Orange and Volusia counties that more than one sonic boom is possible.
The schedule arrives just three days after Starship reached orbit for the first time on Flight 14 from Starbase, Texas, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites. If Thursday’s missions stay on time, SpaceX will have flown Starship, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy from four different pads in about four days.
Crew-13 is also the start of a longer run for Dragon. NASA recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification, keeping Dragon as the agency’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner remains grounded.
Although the two vehicles are built for completely different use cases, Tesla utilized engineering expertise while developing both the Cybercab and Semi to build a thermal architecture that would fit both vehicles. Of course, with some slight revisions.
The development was noted by Lars Moravy and Dan Priestley last week at Tesla’s Semi Handover event in Sparks, Nevada, where the company showed off its dedicated production facility for the Class 8 truck.
🚨 Tesla designed the integrated thermal systems for Cybercab and Semi at the same time as the vehicles were both in development
Tesla wanted to build one thermal system that worked with both vehicles, apart from small modifications.
Semi and Cybercab share parts 🤯 pic.twitter.com/KmzSsUbrcg
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) September 25, 2026
Tesla’s decision to develop one thermal architecture for both the Cybercab and Semi is one of the more revealing engineering choices in the company’s 2026 lineup:
“We designed it at the same time we designed the Cybercab and we said okay we’re going to take our most efficient vehicle and our biggest vehicle and we’re going to take one thermal system and make it work for both.”
Core parts, meaning the compressor, pumps, and heat exchangers, are shared, with only modest changes to cooling-loop sizing and a larger radiator on the truck. The result, they said, is a compressor and thermal stack already proven across millions of miles, delivering “reliability from day one.”
Priestley also highlighted a practical payoff of the indirect design:
“There’s no AC lines, there’s no refrigerant lines…It comes from the factory fully charged, sealed with refrigerant, and it just exchanges coolant. It doesn’t actually run refrigerant up to the front of the vehicle.”
This eliminates potentially leak-prone plumbing that would otherwise require hands-on service, reducing overall uptime and potentially cutting into business margins. The megamanifold runs cabin HVAC and every powertrain heating and cooling loop at once, recapturing waste heat from motors and the battery instead of dumping it the way a diesel engine does.
The approach is just the latest chapter in a continuing story of stretching thermal solutions across wildly different vehicles. Model Y’s Octovalve evolved into the Super Manifold used on Cybertruck, and later Model S/X refreshes. Cybercab then introduced Supermanifold V3, which Tesla says is 80 percent automated to build and 38 percent more efficient than typical automotive thermal systems.
This thermal system is also shared with Cybercab – one thermal system for both our most efficient vehicle & our biggest vehicle
— Tesla Semi (@tesla_semi) September 25, 2026
Tesla has done the same with the 4680 cells, both being utilized in the Cybertruck and Semi, and with heat-pump compressors that Priestley noted were already common across the passenger-car fleet.
Concurrent development of crucial vehicle elements buys scale and reliability that a truck-only thermal system could not match. High-volume passenger car parts are cheaper and more accessible, which can give fleets a sealed, low-maintenance loop of operation from their first day of operation.
For owners and operators, that translates into less energy spent on cabin heat in the colder months, fewer refrigerant-related repairs, and a thermal architecture already stress-tested at passenger-car volumes before the first high-volume Semi left the lines in Nevada.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk certainly tipped off some details of the Tesla Roadster event with a broadening of information regarding the company’s decision to delay the unveiling for two weeks.
For years, people have speculated about what the Roadster will be capable of. While there have been plenty of things said about what it *could* do, we have not seen or been told by Tesla what it will actually be capable of.
However, over the past few days, Tesla’s weather updates have truly pushed the speculation into Plaid Mode, basically all but confirming the car will have some sort of aerial capability — whether that would be hovering or fully flying remains to be seen — but it definitely seems that it will be able to leave the ground intentionally.
“Because this event can only be held outdoors…”
Tesla posted on Monday that it would delay the Roadster event until October 15, and it indicated that it had to do this because the event “can only be held outdoors.”
With the potential SpaceX collaboration to develop cold-gas thrusters that will help the vehicle go airborne, doing this indoors is probably not a safe, or even plausible, possibility.
Roadster event update
We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule.
New date is October 15. Additional details to…
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 28, 2026
FAA Airspace Restriction
The FAA gave Tesla a Temporary Flight Restriction (TFR) for 10,000 feet above ground level, much higher than the typical 2,000-foot restrictions that are usually placed at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas site.
Tesla Roadster event requires restricted airspace, and the FAA obliges
Some have said that this massive increase is due to Tesla’s need to restrict unauthorized drone use for spying on the event.
Elon Admits High Winds
“Due to high winds, the new Roadster demo is postponed by 2 weeks,” Musk said in a post on X yesterday.
Due to high winds, the new Roadster demo is postponed by 2 weeks https://t.co/dV3ojDh1iT
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 30, 2026
A reply reading, “What’s strong wind got to do with a car demo with four grounded wheels?” was directly below Musk’s post, satirically and sarcastically probing for more details.
All signs are pointing toward an aerial demonstration for the Roadster.
SpaceX set to launch astronauts and a classified Falcon Heavy mission on the same day
Tesla Cybercab and Semi have more in common than you might think
