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Driver-assistance tech seen as annoyance by many non-Tesla drivers
Automakers have been adding driver assistance features to new vehicles for years now, especially with the industry gearing towards self-driving technology. However, a recent J.D. Power 2019 U.S. Tech Experience Index (TXI) Study has found that many drivers see them as “nannying” annoyances and often opt to turn them off. While it doesn’t look like Tesla’s all-electric vehicles were included in the study, the results draw an interesting contrast between Autopilot and other manufacturers’ approach to similar technology.
“Automakers are spending lots of money on advanced technology development, but the constant alerts can confuse and frustrate drivers,” explained Kristin Kolodge, Executive Director of Driver Interaction & Human Machine Interface Research at J.D. Power, as quoted in the study’s summary. “The technology can’t come across as a nagging parent; no one wants to be constantly told they aren’t driving correctly.”
When it comes to lane-keeping and centering systems in particular, an average of 23% of customers with these systems complained that the alerts are annoying or bothersome. Of this group, around 61% frequently choose to disable the features. Even more telling is that out of six categories of vehicle features rated by the study, driving assistance was scored second lowest in measured owner experiences. The other categories were collision protection, smartphone mirroring, comfort and convenience, entertainment and connectivity, and navigation. The study overall was focused on owner experiences, usage, and interaction with 38 driver-centric vehicle technologies at 90 days of ownership.
The Kia Stinger scored the highest in all categories out of the vehicles rated by J.D. Power. On a 1,000-point scale, it averaged 834, the overall average being 781 and the lowest-scoring model coming in at 709. The Korean auto maker’s compact luxury sedan has a full suite of active safety features including adaptive cruise control, automatic emergency braking, blind spot warning, rear cross-traffic alert, lane keeping assist, pedestrian detection, and a driver attention alert.
Since owner satisfaction is directly tied to future purchases and customer recommendations, the findings in the J.D. Power study are significant. “When overall satisfaction is greater than 900, 75% “definitely will” repurchase the same make again and 95% “definitely will” recommend it. Automakers looking to drive loyalty need to provide a highly satisfying tech usage experience,” the summary concluded. With this in mind alongside self-driving developments, it’s especially important for owners to find value in their driver assistance features if manufacturers hope to win consumer confidence as features progress.
“Consumers are still very concerned about cars being able to drive themselves, and they want more information about these complex systems, as well as more channels to learn how to use them or how and why they kick in,” Kolodge commented on the findings. “If they can’t be sold on lane-keeping—a core technology of self-driving—how are they going to accept fully automated vehicles? …It’s essential that the industry recognize the importance of an owner’s first experience with these lower-level automated technologies because this will help determine the future of adoption of fully automated vehicles.”
Tesla’s Autopilot is perhaps becoming one of the most well-known driver assist features offered by an auto company today, and it’s primarily due to high owner satisfaction. Owners frequently report their positive experiences with the feature’s traffic capabilities, and numerous videos and stories have been shared about how preventative measures taken by Autopilot have prevented serious traffic incidences. What’s more, Tesla’s own safety data validates these owner findings on a macroscale and has led the company to make some functions available even without the Full Self-Driving suite.
In May, Tesla introduced two new active lane monitoring features designed to help prevent drivers from unintentionally leaving their lane of travel named ‘Lane Departure Avoidance’ and ‘Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance.’ They are derived from Autopilot, yet work while it’s not on. The Lane Departure Avoidance applies corrective steering to keep drivers in their intended travel lane if a departure is sensed without a turn signal. Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance is automatically enabled and is designed to return a Tesla vehicle back to its original lane if a departure and an imminent collision are detected, rather than simply alerting drivers of the situation. “As our quarterly safety reports have shown, drivers using Autopilot register fewer accidents per mile than those driving without it,” Tesla’s press release on the lane-oriented features stated.
Lane-keeping technologies may not be big sellers for legacy auto companies, but Tesla is clearly making very good headway with those features.
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Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has cautioned investors shorting SpaceX shares, drawing a direct parallel to the intense short-selling pressure Tesla faced in its early public years.
Responding to reports of elevated short interest in the newly public rocket, satellite, and AI company, Palihapitiya noted that similar dynamics played out with Tesla, where aggressive short sellers ultimately “went broke.”
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) went public on June 12, 2026, in the largest IPO on record, pricing at $135 per share. Shares quickly surged to an all-time high of $225.64 just days later, briefly implying a valuation exceeding $2 trillion. The stock has since retreated sharply amid valuation concerns, lockup expiration fears, and broader market dynamics.
By early August, it traded near $108–$125, representing a roughly 50 percent decline from the peak and bringing the market capitalization closer to the $1.5–1.7 trillion range. On August 4, shares closed up more than 9 percent at $125.33 ahead of earnings before facing pressure in after-hours and premarket trading.
Short interest has climbed dramatically. According to S3 Partners data widely cited in market reports, short positions reached approximately 219.3 million shares by late July, about 34 percent of the limited public float of roughly 640 million shares, and represented a notional value of around $24.6 billion.
Utilization of shares available to borrow hit 95 percent, with borrow fees rising. This level of shorting exceeded the dollar value of short bets against Tesla at the time and built rapidly ahead of two catalysts: the company’s first post-IPO earnings and an August 6 lockup expiration that could free up to 911.5 million additional shares.
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CEO Elon Musk has issued warnings of his own. In mid-July, as short interest approached one-third of the float, he posted that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” reiterating his view that the company could ultimately be worth more than Earth if it achieves its goals.
On August 4, just before earnings, Musk responded to the latest short-interest data by saying, “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
SpaceX delivered its first quarterly results as a public company after the close on August 4. Second-quarter revenue rose 92 percent year-over-year to $7.8 billion, beating consensus estimates near $6.8–6.9 billion.
The net loss narrowed to $541 million, or 9 cents per share, better than the roughly 23–24 cent loss expected. Starlink/connectivity contributed about $4.3 billion (up 66 percent), while the AI business generated $2.6 billion (up roughly 250 percent). Capital expenditures were heavy at $18.4 billion, largely tied to AI infrastructure. Management projected a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by year-end 2026 and outlined a path toward $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.
The combination of Chamath’s historical reminder, Musk’s repeated alerts, and the company’s ambitious growth targets underscores the high-stakes debate surrounding SPCX. Short sellers are positioned for near-term supply pressure from the lockup, while long-term bulls point to Starlink scale, Starship progress, and AI compute expansion as reasons the bears may ultimately face the same fate as many early Tesla skeptics.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX and Nvidia team up on Musk’s orbital AI bet
SpaceX revealed a new Nvidia satellite partnership, then Musk pledged an exclusive Nvidia hardware commitment.
SpaceX and Nvidia are now working together on the hardware that will power Musk’s orbital data center ambitions. SpaceX announced on X on Tuesday that it is partnering with Nvidia to design the compute payload for Starmind AI1, the first satellite in a planned constellation built to run AI workloads directly in orbit. Each Starmind satellite will carry Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, according to the post, which included renderings of the payload design.
The announcement landed hours before SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, where Musk went further, saying the company has committed to building its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware. “We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia,” Musk told investors on the call,. “So we’re exclusive to Nvidia.”
Musk said SpaceX plans to deploy Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system, codenamed Kyber, both on the ground and in space. He set a target of 2 gigawatts of compute capacity online by the end of this year, scaling to roughly 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Starmind has been in development since Musk confirmed the name in June, following an xAI trademark filing that tipped off the project before SpaceX made it official. The idea is massive in scope and instead of moving data down to ground based servers, satellites equipped with onboard processors and large solar arrays would compute AI workloads in orbit and beam results back to Earth. SpaceX has already filed with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites to support the effort, citing constant solar power and the absence of zoning restrictions as advantages over terrestrial data centers.
The Nvidia exclusivity marks a shift in tone from just two weeks ago, when Musk was busy knocking down a report that SpaceX had ordered $52 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs through Foxconn, calling it fake news at the time. The dollar figure in that rumor may have been wrong, but the underlying direction seems correct. SpaceX’s AI division already leases Colossus compute capacity to Anthropic and Google, and Tuesday’s earnings report showed AI revenue climbing sharply as those deals ramp up.
Nvidia shares rose roughly 3% in Tuesday trading on the news, while SpaceX stock climbed nearly 9% during the day before giving back gains after hours as investors digested the earnings report’s capital spending figures.
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SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) reported a beat in revenues and EBITDA in its first earnings call report while also minimizing losses as its business continues to gain momentum.
After its IPO in July, SpaceX saw some tough losses on Wall Street due to a major selloff after a delay in its 13th Starship test flight. The ship launched later that week and completed what was arguably the most successful IFT operation in the Starship program’s history.
Nevertheless, the company is continuing on and reported some encouraging financials while also promoting what appears to be a robust outlook moving forward in its Space, AI, and Connectivity divisions.
SpaceX to report first-ever earnings today: here’s what to expect
Earnings Results
- Revenues: $7.8 billion reported vs. $6.7 billion expected
- Adjusted EBITDA: $3.5 billion vs. $2 billion expected
- Net loss of $541 million, an improvement of $467 million from net loss of $1.0 billion
Additionally, CFO Bret Johnsen had these comments:
“2026 has been a momentous year so far, and the second quarter demonstrated the true power of SpaceX. Revenue growth accelerated across all our business segments and we delivered strong operating leverage, with significant margin expansion led by our new AI compute agreements. Our unparalleled leadership in launch, Starlink subscriber growth, new enterprise and government partnerships, and best-in-class AI infrastructure underscore our ability to drive meaningful scale and deliver attractive returns. As a newly public company, we are delighted to welcome our broad base of shareholders and bondholders. We ended the second quarter with $100 billion of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, and $47.5 billion in backlog. This financial strength gives us substantial capacity to invest in Starship, Starlink Broadband and Mobile satellites, and our AI platform, while maintaining a disciplined long-term capital allocation framework.”
Space Business Highlights
SpaceX shared some of its biggest Space Business Highlights for Q2:
- Space revenues grew 55% sequentially and 29% year-over-year to $962 million, driven by a higher number of large customer launches and a favorable customer shift compared to the prior year
- Total costs and expenses for the Space segment were up by $389 million year-over-year, as we continued to accelerate R&D investments in our Starship program, which we believe will reduce the cost to orbit by 99% or more relative to the historical average, and unlock significant revenue potential across all business segments
- Leading launch provider for the world with 78 launches and 1,041 metric tons of mass to orbit deployed over the six months ended June 30, 2026, primarily allocated to Connectivity for the deployment of our Starlink constellation
- Starship V3 development continued to advance towards full and rapid reusability:
- Completed Starship V3’s first suborbital mission in May, Flight 12, which achieved a successful lift off from our new Starbase pad, a precision landing of Starship’s upper stage, and deployment of modified V2 Starlink satellites
- Subsequent to the second quarter, completed Starship Flight 13 in July, which achieved all flight objectives including deploying 20 production V3 satellites, demonstrating in-space relight of a Raptor engine, and executing the softest ever splashdown of Starship, providing critical views of an intact heatshield
SpaceX will report its earnings today at 4:30 P.M. EDT.
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SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
SpaceX and Nvidia team up on Musk’s orbital AI bet
