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Tesla invites Europeans to take ‘Drive To Believe’ challenge: one week with Model S

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A new program being offered by Tesla invites residents in select European markets to participate in the company’s latest ‘Drive To Believe’ challenge and win a chance to experience Model S through an extended one week test drive.

Residents of the UK, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, Italy, Denmark, and Ireland that win the challenge will have the opportunity to swap their existing vehicles for a Tesla Model S on specific dates between November 16 and December 31, 2016.

“At Tesla, we believe that it takes driving a Tesla and experiencing its superior performance, safety, and technology, to be convinced. We now want to give you that opportunity as well.”, reads the description on Tesla’s ‘Drive to Believe’ online form.

It’s no secret that Tesla is making a significant investment in expanding its European footprint. CEO Elon Musk recently told investors that the company has plans to expand its battery production into Europe with a second Gigafactory. The company also recently announced that it had acquired top-notch German engineering firm Grohmann Engineering to form a new division aimed at building automated assembly systems, a step towards Musk’s goal of “building the machine that builds the machine”. Continued efforts on scaling Tesla’s European infrastructure while streamlining manufacturing processes and logistics allows the company to position itself ahead of demand.

Meanwhile, programs such as the latest ‘Drive To Believe’ challenge allows the company’s sales arm to focus on driving demand overseas. Secondarily, by having prize winners sign off on terms that would allow Tesla to film their experience with a Model S, the company is able to leverage its Customer Stories program as a tool to build trust among interested buyers and further stimulate sales efforts.

We’ve included the full details of Tesla’s ‘Drive to Believe’ European competition.

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TESLA ‘DRIVE TO BELIEVE’ EUROPEAN COMPETITION 2016

1. The promoter
1.1 The promoter is: Tesla Motors Netherlands B.V., Burgemeester Stramanweg 122 (1101 EN), Amsterdam Netherlands (Tesla).

2. The competition
2.1 The title of the competition is TESLA ‘DRIVE TO BELIEVE’.
2.2 Entrants must answer a skill-based question within the space provided in the competition field online at www.tesla.com/drive-to-believe
2.3 The competition will run in one phase. For you to be eligible for the competition, your entry must be submitted between 00:01 on 16th November to 23:59 on 31 December 2016
2.4 You may enter the competition only once.
2.5 All competition entries received after 23:59 on 31 December 2016 will be automatically disqualified from the competition.
2.6 To enter the competition you must fill in all required fields on www.tesla.com/drive-to-believe
2.7 Participation in the competition can only take place at www.tesla.com/drive-to-believe. No applications to enter made in any other manner will be accepted.
2.8 No purchase necessary.
2.9 Tesla will not accept:
(a) responsibility for competition entries that are lost, mislaid, damaged or delayed in transit, regardless of cause, including, for example, as a result of any equipment failure, technical malfunction, systems, satellite, network, server, computer hardware or software failure of any kind; or
(b) proof of transmission as proof of receipt of entry to the competition.
2.10 By submitting a competition entry, you are agreeing to be bound by these terms and conditions.
2.11 The competition entry selection will be based on the entrant’s specific eligibility for the competition. The decision of Tesla (acting reasonably) will be final. Tesla reserves the right to amend the criteria used to judge entries.
2.12 By entering the competition, you hereby warrant that all information submitted by you in your entry is true, accurate and complete in every respect. Tesla reserves the right to verify any information contained in your entry and/or your eligibility to enter the competition.
2.13 Tesla reserve the right in its absolute discretion to disqualify any entrant if it has reasonable grounds to believe that an entrant has breached any of these terms and conditions or any applicable law. Each entrant acknowledges and agrees that any failure to comply with these terms and conditions could lead to Tesla disqualifying that person, without Tesla giving any reason for such disqualification or granting any opportunity for challenge.
2.14 In the event that a prize-winner is disqualified from the competition, Tesla will select an alternative prize-winner in the same manner as the original prize-winner and such selection will be subject to these terms and conditions.

3. Eligibility
3.1 The competition is only open to all residents in the following European markets: UK, Germany, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, France, Austria, Belgium, Finland, Luxembourg, Italy, Denmark, Ireland
3.2 Entrants must be 25 years of age or above and own a car and hold a valid driver’s license for the market they reside in and enter the competition from.
3.3 Entrants must be able to provide proof of identity.
3.4 Entrants must be willing to be filmed and for all footage and image and voice recordings of their person to be used for Tesla promotional purposes, in all media, globally, in perpetuity for no additional fee or financial remuneration of any kind.
3.5 Any person that is any of the following is not eligible to win the competition:
(a) an employee of Tesla or its holding or subsidiary companies;
(b) an employee of agents or suppliers of Tesla or its holding or subsidiary companies, who are professionally connected with the competition or its administration; or
(c) a member of the immediate families or households of (a) and (b) above.
Tesla reserves the right to disqualify any person that it knows is, or has reasonable grounds to believe is, ineligible for the competition as a result of this condition.
3.6 In entering the competition, you confirm that you are eligible to do so and eligible to claim the prize. Tesla may require you to provide proof that you are eligible to enter the competition.
3.7 Tesla will not accept competition entries that are:
(a) automatically generated by computer;
(b) completed by third parties;
(c) illegible, have been altered, reconstructed, forged or tampered with;
(d) incomplete.
3.8 There is a limit of one entry per person for the duration of the competition. In the event that Tesla discovers or has reasonable grounds to believe that the same person has made multiple entries, such person and any entries made by them shall be disqualified and, if such entrant has already been selected as a prize-winner, an alternative prize-winner will be selected in accordance with condition 2.14
3.9 Tesla reserves all rights to disqualify you if your conduct is contrary to the spirit or intention of the competition or if you engage in political slogans or homophobic language, behaviour of a lewd or explicitly sexual nature or engage in content which is defamatory, obscene, illegal, vulgar, offensive or otherwise unsuitable or infringes others’ rights (including intellectual property rights).

4 The prize
4.1 The prize is as following:
(a) Competition winners must swap their current car for a Tesla Model S for the duration of one week to take place on specific dates Tesla will select between 00:01 on 16th November to 23:59 on 31 December 2016.
4.2 The prize is supplied by Tesla.
4.3 There is no cash alternative for the prize. The prize is not negotiable or transferable.
4.4 In order to claim the prize you must comply with condition 6.

5. Winner announcement
5.1 The winners of the competition will be announced across all media to be selected by Tesla on a date or dates to be selected by Tesla.
5.2 The decision of Tesla is final and no correspondence or discussion will be entered into.
5.3 Tesla will contact the winner personally as soon as Tesla has selected a shortlist of winners.

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6. Claiming the prize
6.1 If you are the winner of the prize, you will have 2 days from the Announcement Date to claim the prize. If you do not claim the prize within this timeframe, your claim will become invalid.
6.2 The prize may not be claimed by a third party on your behalf.
6.3 Tesla will make all reasonable efforts to contact the winner. If the winner cannot be contacted or is not available, or has not claimed their prize within 2 days of contact, Tesla reserves the right to offer the prize to the next eligible entrant selected from the correct entries that were received.
6.4 Tesla does not accept any responsibility if you are not able to take up the prize.
6.5 No prize will be awarded where any entrant has committed any form of misconduct (as determined by Tesla in its sole discretion).

7. Limitation of liability
Insofar as is permitted by law, Tesla, its agents or distributors will not in any circumstances be responsible or liable to compensate the winner or accept any liability for any loss, damage, disappointment, personal injury or death occurring as a result of any entrant entering this competition, taking up the prize, or as a result of any entrant winning or not winning any prize, except where it is caused by the negligence of Tesla, its agents or distributors or that of their employees. Your statutory rights are not affected.

8. Ownership and intellectual property rights
8.1 You agree that Tesla (and any third party authorised by Tesla) may use your person, voice and image for any promotional purpose (for example, placing it on the Tesla webpage and social channels for advertising media. You give Tesla (and any third party authorised by Tesla) your irrevocable permission to use, reproduce, publish, display, transmit, copy, amend, store, sell and sub-license your person, voice and image worldwide and in perpetuity for promotional purposes and for the purposes of the competition. Tesla will own the right to your image and voice recordings captured during the duration of the competition.
8.2 By submitting your competition entry, you agree to:
(a) assign to Tesla all your voice and image rights with full title guarantee; and
(b) waive all moral rights,
8.3 You agree that Tesla may, but is not required to, make your personal image and voice recordings available on our social media channels and websites and any other media, whether now known or invented in the future, and in connection with any publicity of the competition. You agree to grant Tesla a non-exclusive, worldwide, irrevocable license, for the full period of any intellectual property rights in your image and voice recordings, to use, display, publish, transmit, copy, edit, alter, store, re-format for such purposes.

9. Data protection and publicity
9.1 If you are the winner of the competition you agree that Tesla may use your name, image, and town or country of residence to announce the winner of this competition and for any other reasonable and related promotional purposes.
9.2 You further agree to participate in any reasonable publicity required by Tesla.
9.3 By entering the competition, you agree that any personal information provided by you with the competition entry may be held and used only by Tesla or their agents and suppliers to administer the competition.

10. General
10.1 If there is any reason to believe that there has been a breach of these terms and conditions, Tesla may, at its sole discretion, reserve the right to exclude you from participating in the competition.
10.2 In the event of any dispute regarding these terms and conditions, the conduct or results of the competition, or any other matter relating to a competition, the decision of Tesla shall be final and unchallengeable and no correspondence or discussion shall be entered into, comment issued, or reason given in respect of any decision made by Tesla.
10.3 Tesla reserves the right to hold void, suspend, cancel, or amend all or any part of the competition where it becomes necessary to do so. Any changes to these terms and conditions, or cancellation of the competition, will be posted on the Tesla website. It is the responsibility of entrants to keep themselves informed as to any changes to the terms and conditions.
10.4 These terms and conditions and any dispute arising out of or in connection with them or their subject matter (including any non-contractual disputes or claims) shall be governed by the laws of the Netherlands and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of The Netherlands.

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Gene has been obsessed with cars since before he could legally sit in the front seat. Writer, researcher, unofficial CS support, accountant, native suit guy when needed, and overall stick poker. He approaches every story the way he approaches a road trip: with too much enthusiasm, not enough planning, and a surprisingly good outcome. gene@teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk shuts down talk of TSMC taking over Terafab

Musk says Tesla and SpaceX will build and run Terafab, with TSMC limited to renting.

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SpaceX Terafab rendering

Elon Musk has drawn a firm line around who will be in charge of Terafab, the giant chip factory Tesla and SpaceX are planning in Texas.

Musk replied to a post on X arguing that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) would most likely end up owning and operating the plant. “No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that,” Musk wrote. “Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that.”

In plain terms, a sublease means TSMC could rent a section of the complex to make chips, similar to a tenant renting one floor of an office tower. The building, the equipment decisions and the daily operation would stay with Tesla and SpaceX.

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The comment shuts down speculation that started last week. On October 2, tech journalist Tim Culpan reported that TSMC was exploring ways to help run Terafab’s factories. Musk responded the next day that it was “just discussions, but something may come of it,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That left room for a scenario where the world’s largest contract chipmaker took the wheel. Musk’s latest post closes that door.

Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner

Some background helps explain why this matters. Tesla designs its own AI chips today but pays outside companies like TSMC and Samsung to manufacture them. Musk unveiled Terafab in March as a joint project between Tesla, SpaceX and xAI, arguing that existing suppliers cannot expand fast enough to meet his companies’ future demand. The goal is to produce enough chips each year to supply one terawatt of computing power, roughly 50 times what the entire global AI chip industry produces now.

Those chips are meant for Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, the Cybercab and Full Self-Driving computers, along with chips for SpaceX’s planned data centers in orbit. Owning the factory means Musk’s companies would not have to compete with every other chip customer for time on someone else’s production lines.

Intel is still part of the picture. The company signed on in April to help design, build and package chips for the project, and CEO Lip-Bu Tan told Bloomberg this week that Intel will keep working on Terafab despite the TSMC chatter.

The project moved from concept to construction planning over the summer. In August, SpaceX confirmed the Grimes County site about an hour from Houston, sent the county a $10 million payment under its tax abatement deal and said civil work would begin shortly. The first phase carries a $16.8 billion price tag, and total spending across all phases could reach as much as $119 billion.

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TSMC chairman C.C. Wei has said a new fab typically takes two to three years to build and another one to two years to reach full output. Tesla and SpaceX have never run one, which is why TSMC’s expertise drew so much attention. Musk’s answer suggests he would rather learn that process in house than hand control of a project this central to Tesla’s robotics and autonomy plans to an outside company.

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Elon Musk

Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK

Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at Thursday’s White House summit.

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elon musk and donald trump in front of a tesla cybertruck at the white house

Elon Musk is set to receive the highest honor the U.S. government gives to scientists and engineers.

President Donald Trump will present Musk with the National Medal of Science on Thursday at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age Summit, Fox News Digital first reported on Wednesday. Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and AMD CEO Lisa Su will receive the same medal, while Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. A White House official later confirmed the list to Reuters.

“The Trump administration is grateful for the contributions of these incredible leaders in science and technology. These recipients are helping ensure America keeps leading the world in innovation,” White House spokesperson Liz Huston told Fox News.

It will be the first time Trump has presented either medal in his two terms. Congress created the National Medal of Science in 1959, and the National Science Foundation, which administers it, says 529 scientists and engineers have received it since. A presidential committee reviews nominees, but the president makes the final call.

Thursday’s group of medalists run or founded companies, and three of them sit at the center of the Super Intelligence hardware race that Musk competes in. Huang’s Nvidia supplies the GB300 chips filling SpaceX’s Colossus 2 cluster, while Su’s AMD is Nvidia’s biggest rival in data center GPUs.

Worth noting that Trump’s uncle, MIT physicist John G. Trump, received the National Medal of Science from President Ronald Reagan for his work on ionizing radiation and its uses in medicine and industry.

The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future

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For Musk, the medal is the latest sign of how far his relationship with Trump has come since their 2025 split over the “Big Beautiful Bill” and his exit from DOGE. Last week, he sat at Trump’s left during a White House lunch where AI executives signed a voluntary safety accord, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth named him to help lead the Pentagon’s Project Meridian study on the future of warfare. Musk has also adopted the administration’s new vocabulary, saying on Sunday that SpaceXAI will be renamed SpaceXSI after Trump ordered federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence.”

Musk has collected science honors before, including the Stephen Hawking Medal for Science Communication in 2019.

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Lifestyle

Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life

Tesla shares dashcam footage of FSD Supervised stopping mid intersection to avoid a T-bone crash.

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Credit: @BLKMDL3/X

Tesla is putting another Full Self-Driving save in front of its 24.8 million followers on X.

On Tuesday morning, Tesla’s main account shared a dashcam clip with the caption “FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash.” The footage came from an owner posting as TheNewGrid, who described what happened at a stop sign: “I looked at the car coming to the stop sign figured they would stop, my car went, then came to a stop mid intersection as they flew by. Had I been manually driving this would have resulted in a crash.”

The sequence is the notable part. FSD had already started crossing when the other driver ran the stop sign. Instead of pressing on, the car braked hard in the middle of the intersection and let the crossing vehicle pass in front of it. By the owner’s own account, they had made the same assumption the software initially made, that the other car would stop, and would not have corrected in time.

The clip is the latest in a run of safety posts Tesla has amplified over the past several days. On Saturday, the company shared a video from Selling Sunset star Jason Oppenheim, who sold his Bentley for a Model Y and said he was buying Teslas with FSD for 10 of his employees. Ashok Elluswamy, who leads Tesla AI, followed up by writing that Tesla self-driving “reacts to other people cutting into your path with super-human response times.” On Monday, a Cybertruck owner posted footage of FSD moving across three lanes from a red light to clear a path for an ambulance approaching from behind.

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This recent clip also lands a few weeks after Tesla began shipping Automatic Collision Evasion with FSD v14.3.9, a feature that can activate FSD on the driver’s behalf when a frontal collision is imminent or the driver appears distracted. Elluswamy said in September that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” are coming with v15, the release Tesla has tied to round the clock Robotaxi operation.

The safety messaging matters beyond social media. Tesla has said FSD Supervised was 4.1 times less likely to crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on European roads, and it has been putting those figures in front of regulators. Eight EU countries have now approved FSD Supervised, with Croatia the most recent, but the EU’s bloc-wide vote originally set for October 6 has been pushed to December at the earliest.

FSD Supervised is still a Level 2 system, and the driver remains responsible at all times. Even heavy users find reasons to step in. Teslarati’s Joey Klender, who uses FSD for about 76 percent of his driving, laid out five recurring issues on Tuesday that still prompt him to intervene. Clips like this one show the other column of that ledger: moments where the software caught a mistake a human was about to make.

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