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Tesla’s Driving Visualization will soon depict the company’s vehicles

Credit: YouTube | Daniel Spalding

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Tesla’s Driving Visualization feature will soon render each of the company’s electric vehicles accurately, instead of using the generic sedan, SUV, or pickup that appears on the Dashscreen currently. Company CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Driving Visualization would receive these improvements, which could open the door for a new in-car video game.

Musk responded to a question from a Twitter follower that asked if Driving Visualization would improve to have custom vehicle models on the dash screen display. @WholeMarsBlog‘s focus was primarily on the Visualization of the Tesla Cybertruck. “Rendering as a normal truck seems inappropriate,” the question said.

However, Musk confirmed that not only the Cybertruck would be rendered accurately, but all Tesla vehicles would render “specifically as their model & color instead of as a generic sedan/SUV.”

Driving Visualization gives Tesla owners a full-range animated image of the surroundings of the car. This includes other vehicles and some objects on the road.

However, the feature does not tell the driver precisely what vehicle is surrounding their car. It generalizes its surroundings by showing only the type of vehicle. For example, if a Ford Escape were near the Tesla, an SUV would appear, but its shape would not match the exact look of a Ford Escape.

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Interestingly enough, the Driving Visualization feature does not depict other Tesla cars. But it seems an update will arrive soon for owners that will fix this.

Additionally, Musk hinted that a new “punch buggy sort of game” could be derived from the next improvements to Driving Visualization.

Tesla has worked to continuously improve the gamification within its vehicles, which has been a focus of Musk. The Tesla CEO himself is an avid video game fan, and he has made it a point to add video games and other sources of entertainment into its vehicles to keep drivers occupied when using a Supercharger or during downtime.

During the company’s recent Q2 2020 Earnings Call, Musk indicated that Tesla is working to add more features related to productivity and entertainment to prepare for the company’s Full Self-Driving suite is complete and autonomous driving is possible.

“Now, when things do become full self-driving, so what are people going to do in the car,” Musk asked. “Well, I guess they’re probably going to do productivity and entertainment of some kind, watch movies, play games, and do work. That’s in the future. We’re already putting some games and stuff on the car just for fun.”

Currently, the company does offer a buggy-styled racing game with Beach Buggy Racing 2. The game can be played with the use of the steering wheel, or by plugging in a compatible gaming controller.

Improvements to Tesla’s Driving Visualization will not only increase the accuracy of the company’s Autopilot and FSD suites, but it will also give owners an additional sense of pride when driving near another one of the company’s electric cars. Also, the addition of a new video game within the vehicle will increase entertainment for drivers while there is downtime.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years

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Daniel Oberhaus, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.

Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.

Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.

He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.

This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:

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This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.

Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.

Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.

But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.

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Tesla just built it 10 millionth car

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.

In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.

Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.

The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.

Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.

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This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.

Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.

Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.

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SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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