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.
Lifestyle
Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory
Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.
Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.
The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.
Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory
Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.
Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
Tesla crosses major Unsupervised Self-Driving milestone
Tesla Robotaxi will be a 24/7 service: here’s when
