Lifestyle
Leave Tesla alone, autonomous cars can’t come soon enough
Here in Philly, I could set my clock by daily rush hour accidents once school starts. I’ve joked that since most school kids aren’t old enough to drive, teachers must be terrible drivers. Either that or they don’t drive all summer and have to learn all over again. In reality, roads are just more crowded. Many more people are on the roads during the 7am and 4pm hours that I commute. In addition, there are a new set of stressors and distractions for parents that come with the kids going back to school. All of this is a recipe for disaster.
Yesterday was the first day of school for those in Philadelphia public schools and as expected, I encountered an accident on my way home. The car, a Nissan, was turned the wrong way and had an exceptionally mangled front end. I sincerely hope whoever was driving the car survived, though I wouldn’t be surprised if they hadn’t.
What caused the accident? Driving a car is a series of mundane tasks and subconscious mental processes. Did the driver make an honest mistake and misjudge something? Or was he distracted by thoughts of school supplies or a little red number showing a notification on any one of the many communication apps on his smart phone? Maybe he had nothing to do with it. Maybe another driver made an egregious error and the Nissan did all it could to avoid it, but ended up losing control. Maybe he and another driver both processed routine thoughts to make driving decisions such as seeing that there was a space in the middle lane and deciding to merge into it.
Whatever the case, I’m fairly certain that being in a Tesla while using Autopilot driver’s assistance features, the Nissan driver would be a very different situation right now. The Tesla would have attempted some maneuver to mitigate the crash as best as it could. Not knowing the situation, I certainly can’t claim the accident would not have happened in a Tesla. What I can claim is that once full autonomy comes to cars, the roads will be measurably safer. They have to be, or the technology will be regulated out of existence.
“once full autonomy comes to cars, the roads will be measurably safer”
A few miles later and more minutes than it should have taken, I was off the highway. I came to a 4-way stop sign, which are extremely common where I live. The problem with 4-way stop signs is that you process them without even thinking. Stop, wait a few seconds, move. I’ve been guilty a few times of going too early and cutting off the person who deserved to cross the intersection ahead of me. I’ve been the one cut off plenty too. So many times with stop signs you are just stopping for an appropriate interval of time rather than actually waiting for someone. (Chances are, that someone has already gone quickly, if there is someone on the cross street at all.) Again, this all happens so many times per drive that it has become an almost subconscious process. Your foot holds the brake pedal. Your foot moves to the go pedal.
Oh Sh#! Moment
What happened next did so in a flash, and left my hands shaking. I came to a stop and stayed that way for some appropriate length of time. In an imperceptibly short amount of time, my brain decided the pickup truck waiting to cross my path wasn’t going and I should go. There was a woman standing on the corner with a dog. I’m pretty sure my brain processed that the pickup truck driver was talking to her. He didn’t wave me on, but something made me go.
What should have happened next is that the pickup truck driver should have honked at me and cursed me out. Maybe even held up a 1-finger salute. That is not what happened. What happened is that after I had already started going, he did too. For another imperceptibly short amount of time, my brain thought ‘crap, I guess just cut this guy off.’ Then, he didn’t stop. After his nearly subconscious process of moving his foot from brake to go pedal, he should have seen me in his path and stopped. I can only assume he was not looking ahead. He was getting closer and I quickly calculated that since I was in a Tesla and he in a truck, the best course of action was to stomp on the go pedal. That’s what I did. I accelerated faster than I should have in a residential area, but I’d certainly rather go from 10 to 30 mph too quickly than be in an accident. I heard tires screeching, then the word “asshole” being yelled.
What just happened? Who was at fault? Me, partially, because I took his turn. Him, mostly, because regardless of what another person does, if you are stopped then begin moving and t-bone that someone, you’re at fault. He should have been looking. He should have stopped. He would have had plenty of time to stop considering he was starting from a complete stop. I had been paying attention. He hadn’t. There was no reason for this situation to result in tire screeching. There was definitely no reason for it to result in a collision.
Computers vs. the Human Brain
The point is, human brains are amazing. They process unlimited amounts of information in record time. They are efficient. Too efficient even. They take shortcuts to arrive at a thought. (Lights are off at CVS and it’s midnight, it must be closed. No need to go to the door and check the sign to see closing time.) All of these shortcuts help us to drive but can also harm us. We get too complacent, too quick to take action without intentional thought. Have you ever been driving and realized you don’t really recall the last few miles? Probably. Your brain and hands and feet drove you, without incident, to that point. To add to this, our brains are thinking about other things. We change the radio station, adjust our air conditioning, mentally plan dinner and chores, wonder how our spouse’s day went. Autonomous cars will have one job. That job will be to drive safely. I picture a world where cars communicate too, so the question of whose turn it is at a 4-way stop sign should be an easy one. An autonomous car won’t stop to talk to the lady on the corner with the dog. An autonomous car won’t look away from the road ahead. An autonomous car may have camera failure, but it would know it was unable to see and act accordingly.
If anyone out there still thinks Tesla’s Autopilot is a gimmick, hear this: it is a group of driver’s assistance features that make us leaps closer to truly autonomous driving. In my opinion – and presumably that of the poor Nissan driver – it can’t come soon enough.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks Tesla Roadster’s future
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors
Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Tesla Cybercab gets crazy change as mass production begins
Tesla confirms Cybercab with no steering wheel enters production
