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Tesla 3D labeling is the next big leap for Autopilot
Tesla’s 3D labeling efforts are integral to the development of its Full Self-Driving suite. Using over 2.2 billion miles of real-world driving data from its electric vehicle fleet, the electric car maker has a treasure trove of information about how human drivers behave.
Elon Musk recently confirmed that Tesla is finishing work on Autopilot core foundation code and 3D labeling, and once these are done, users can expect the electric carmaker to roll out more functionalities in a potentially more efficient manner. More advanced features such as Reverse Summon will also be rolled out.
Tesla 3D Labeling: The Next Big Thing
The Tesla CEO has tagged 3D labeling as the next big thing for the company’s efforts to achieve full self-driving. “In terms of labeling, labeling with video in all eight cameras simultaneously. This is a really, I mean in terms of labeling efficiency, arguably like a three order of magnitude improvement in labeling efficiency where Tesla vehicles use all of its eight cameras simultaneously, and that the company has improved significantly in terms of labeling efficiency,” Musk said during the Q4 2019 earnings call.
During Autonomy Day last year, Tesla’s AI head Andrej Karpathy gave the electric vehicle community an idea of how labeling is done. He said annotating data is a very expensive process that initially involved people processing data, but Tesla has also been using information from its fleet to automate the process of labeling using different mechanisms.
For example, in predicting cut-ins, Tesla taps into its fleet for data on such incidents. This information is then automatically annotated and used to train the neural network, which in turn learns from recognizable patterns. This information is then spun until the neural network is trained enough. Improvements in the neural network can then be rolled out as an update for Autopilot.
The same is true according to Karpathy when it comes to object detection. Tesla sources data from its fleet to learn more about different objects and anomalies on the road. With automated 3D labeling, the neural network can more efficiently process the information and learn even about the rarest things one can encounter on the road.
Karpathy and Musk explained how annotations from its fleet help with path prediction. Using trajectories collected from the real-world, the neural network can improve its driving behavior, say while approaching a corner that it doesn’t actively see. This smarter neural network is perfectly demonstrated by an older Model X with early-gen Autopilot negotiating a muddy rural backroad recently, after a storm in the United Kingdom.
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All of these things form part of the equation to achieve Full Self-Driving capabilities. Likely through 3D labeling improvements in the past year or so, Tesla has immensely improved driving visualizations in vehicles equipped with Hardware 3, which now identify traffic lights, garbage cans, and detailed road markings, among others. Thus, Elon Musk’s explanation about rewriting the Autopilot foundational code and 3D labeling could be a way of emphasizing that Tesla owners’ investment in the company’s Full Self-Driving suite would be proven worth it and more soon.
Tesla’s FSD computer and autonomy software will transform how humans travel. The company’s vehicles will be smart enough to drive like humans and eventually make the roads a few times safer for everyone. This may also pave the way for Robotaxis and help achieve Musk’s vision of Teslas earning for their owners while they are busy with work or even while relaxing at home. Tesla Robotaxis would be an attractive form of transportation as they will be more cost-efficient compared to driving personal cars, as predicted by ARK Invest.
Autonomy As Key To Profitability
Autonomy will spell profits for Tesla, as Elon Musk explained during the company’s Q4 2019 earnings call. In order to achieve sustained profitability, Tesla needs to produce high volume units with high margins. Musk appears to consider autonomy as key to Tesla’s high margins as well.
“As we’re close to Full Self-Driving, that is just going to become more and more compelling. So that’s for our financial standpoint, that’s the real mind-blowing situation is high-volume, high-margin because of autonomy,” Musk said.
With FSD capabilities, Tesla adds more value proposition that can help sway even more customers to purchase its electric vehicles from the Model 3, Model Y, Model S, Model X, or the Cybertruck. Depending on regulations in specific regions, Tesla can tap into most of its earnings potential, which bodes well since the company has current plans to expand its presence worldwide with Gigafactories in multiple regions.
Tesla’s path to autonomy is only one of the aspects that make it the leader in the electric vehicle industry. Add to that its advancements on car connectivity and battery technology and one will complete the equation why legacy carmakers with the deepest of pockets can only watch in amazement as a relatively young electric car maker dominates the emerging EV industry.
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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
