News
Ford CEO warns Elon Musk that Tesla is competing with the ‘ultimate disruptor’ in Henry Ford
Ford CEO Jim Hackett admits that the future of the automobile will be electric. Amidst this transition, the CEO noted that there will be disruptors that are bound to emerge. Yet, despite the arrival of these competitors, Hackett believes that Ford will ultimately have what it takes to maintain its place in the auto industry.
Poppy Harlow of CNN Business, who was interviewing the Ford CEO, mentioned how Tesla CEO Elon Musk remarked that the Detroit-based veteran carmaker will likely not make in the next recession. Responding to the interviewer, Hackett candidly noted that while he respects Musk as a competitor, Tesla will be facing a great challenge in Ford because the automaker is a disruptor itself.
“There’s a disruptor coming. I happen to compete with a rocket scientist who’s really smart, and I respect that about him. And yet, he’s competing with the ultimate disruptor in Henry Ford. When you go seven miles from here and you see the Rouge Complex, Henry bet the company, he goes bankrupt because there’s no industrial model in the world that has a hundred thousand people working in it. That one did, and [it] took 12 hours to build a vehicle before [Henry Ford] built it. It went down to 52 minutes. Today, we build an F-150 every 53 seconds,” Hackett stated.
Hackett’s statements harken back to what could very well be the most disruptive era of Ford’s history. Led by Henry Ford, the company opened its River Rouge factory in 1917, and it revolutionized the production of automobiles to such a degree that Henri Citroën, Louis Renault and Kiichiro Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, all visited the plant to study how Ford operated it.
Tesla, for its part, has exhibited great growth over its 16 years of operation. The automaker already sells more electric cars than any other car company on the market, but production-wise, Tesla’s factories are yet to achieve the same unanimous recognition as Henry Ford’s River Rouge facility. This, according to Hackett, is where Ford has a distinct advantage over Tesla. Thus, the CEO noted that he is not too worried about competition from the Silicon Valley-based electric car maker.
“So let’s go back to the challenges of the disruptor. How well does their production system work? How fast were they building cars? Which is saying that fitness, as we were saying, is a compendium of things that you have to get right. It’s not just the technology in this case. You have to have an industrial model. Ford’s really good at this,” Hackett said.
Apart from his statements about the competition rising from companies like Tesla, the Ford CEO stated that the Detroit-based automaker is fully committed to the transportation industry’s shift to autonomous vehicles. Hackett noted that he expects Ford to have fully autonomous cars ready by 2021, which will be ready for real-world testing without human drivers. Similar to Musk’s statements, the Ford CEO mentioned that the company’s self-driving initiatives will largely be dependent on regulators.
For now, and with upcoming vehicles such as the Tesla Pickup Truck preparing to enter its most profitable segment, Ford is busying itself on establishing strategic partnerships. Among these involve electric truck startup Rivian, which received a $500 million investment from Ford, and Volkswagen, whose partnership will allow the companies to come up with two new electric vehicles for the European market. Ford has also invested $1 billion in Argo, a company that develops autonomous driving technology.
Watch an excerpt from the Ford CEO’s interview with CNN Business in the video below.
Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi service hours by pushing the time back by one hour, keeping the ride-hailing service operational until 11 p.m., one hour later than previously.
CEO Elon Musk confirmed the change and offered a specific reason the expansion has been gradual: the system still needs to reliably avoid small pets that are difficult to see after dark, as they commonly blend into the color of the road, especially when they’re grey.
The latest adjustment restores only a fraction of the operating window the service once held. When paid Robotaxi rides began in Austin on June 22, 2025, vehicles ran from 6 a.m. to midnight.
In September 2025, Tesla lengthened the day to a 2 a.m. close, producing a 20-hour window that stayed in place for most of the following year. By early August of this year, the cutoff had already been pulled back; an August 26 update formalized hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. across Austin and several other markets.
The October move to 11 p.m. therefore leaves the Austin day one hour shorter than the original launch schedule and three hours shorter than the 2025 peak.
Musk addressed the constraint directly after the announcement. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” he wrote. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
Robotaxi operating hours moved from 10pm to 11pm.
The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The example points to a low-contrast perception problem in which a small animal can blend into the road surface under limited lighting.
Tesla’s vehicles rely on cameras and neural-network processing rather than lidar; Musk has previously argued that advanced vision software can extract useful information even in low light by analyzing photon counts, but the pet-detection case remains the stated limiter in later hours.
The modest schedule change arrives alongside faster growth in the purpose-built Cybercab fleet. Texas registration data tracked by observers showed the Austin Cybercab count rising sharply in recent weeks, reaching 169 vehicles after more than 100 were added in a short span.
Tesla has indicated that a broader shift toward 24-hour operation is tied to the upcoming FSD v15 software release expected this month on Robotaxi vehicles. Until that capability is validated for the edge cases Musk described, the company continues to add service time incrementally rather than jumping straight to overnight coverage.
The one-hour extension gives Austin riders a later option for evening trips while the underlying detection work continues.
Tesla has snagged a deal with IMC Logistics to supply the company with 50 Semi units for its logistics operations.
IMC handles drayage and landside logistics and has over 2,700 asset trucks in its fleet. In its over forty years of service, it has established more than 50 locations across the United States and spans operations from coast to coast.
Jim Gillis of IMC said that the addition of the Tesla Semi will help IMC move toward a “zero-emission service for long-haul lanes.”
The move is one that has become more common over the past few years, as more and more companies doing large-scale logistics have moved to sustainable powertrains, using either Tesla or others.
🚨 IMC Logistics announced that it will add 50 Tesla Semis to its fleet https://t.co/ymh1Ca2IuX
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 5, 2026
Tesla’s Semi program just entered its first truly public phase, as the company handed over its first production units to companies in September, although a pilot program with companies like PepsiCo. and Frito-Lay has been ongoing for years.
IMC announced its intention to purchase 50 Semi units from Tesla in September, and according to VP of Marketing and Public Relations on September 29 to Trucking Drive, the company will take delivery either this week or took delivery late last week.
With surging prices of diesel and high logistics costs, Tesla and the Semi could truly revolutionize how companies manage their fleets. With the advent of Full Self-Driving, the Semi will potentially cut down on driver fatigue and increase productivity, while decreasing the cost of operation per mile by being cheaper to refuel.
Tesla had a dedicated Semi handover event at the Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, a few weeks back, as it officially introduced its truck to many company fleets that have been waiting to add these sustainable powertrains.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Tesla Robotaxi expands hours, Musk explains why it’s been a challenge
Tesla snags Semi supply deal with major logistics firm
