News
Tesla opens Erie Supercharger connecting west PA with NY
After years of not-so-quiet desperation, the “missing link” Supercharger in Erie, PA has finally powered up! The location is a vital link for Tesla owners going multiple directions and one that has been near the top of regional owners’ requests.
While you might not think of Erie as a transportation hub, it quickly became a desirable charging stop as the Supercharger network has been built out, much like railroad stations and crossroads have historically become vital only after their peripheral arteries grew.
Emails to and from Tesla suggesting locations had always centered around the busy Peach Street commercial district. Indications were strong that Tesla had found a site long ago only to have it fall through for unknown reasons– a story that would seem to mirror the same timetable and complications that long plagued the Harrisburg, PA Supercharger.
The one-two punch of having two strategically located Pennsylvania charging sites fall through must have hit the team hard after the relative ease of building Somerset and Cranberry locations near Pittsburgh. Harrisburg was another long-bemoaned missing link that made travel across the state problematic at best. Eventually, a welcoming property was found and construction in Harrisburg and Erie have been nearly simultaneous, with Harrisburg coming online just a few weeks earlier.
With Erie now powered up, the hosting businesses in Erie are hoping to attract some new guests. My own observations from frequent travels up and down I-79/90 would suggest they’re going to be pleasantly surprised. Ontario license plates make semi-annual appearances in large numbers as the “Snowbirds” transit western Pennsylvania. They’re also common sights around Pittsburgh year-round, with a good majority of them coming from Toronto.
The largest city in Ontario is its provincial capital, Toronto– indeed, it might surprise many to find out that Toronto has long been the largest city in Canada, more than double the size of Vancouver. It also barely nudges Chicago out of the top four on the continent, with only Mexico City, New York City and Los Angeles claiming more residents. So when the city of Toronto goes on vacation… a good many of them wind up in western Pennsylvania.
For Tesla owners in Ontario, the Erie Supercharger is a reasonable half-day’s drive away. Straight drive-time is about 4 hours, but add in border crossings, charging stops and some meals and those driving from Canada will find the proximity of the Erie hotels to be an ideal overnight rest– regardless of which way they’re going. It’s also an ideal overnight from Washington, DC (among others) and a more ambitious day away from Chicago or Boston. The “jump” from Pittsburgh/Cleveland to Buffalo is history!
More importantly, the addition of Erie makes these trips less butt-clenching. Hyper-miling the stretch from Ohio or Pittsburgh to Buffalo, New York, was always doable in warm weather with careful planning and discipline. Winter brings brutally cold weather from across Lake Erie and strong headwinds (particularly for south/west bound traffic), often laden with snow and ice. With that comes a dramatically shortened range and the trip becomes very questionable in even an 85/90 kWh Tesla. Several drivers have found themselves limping through bad weather conditions with cabin heat exchanged for heart-pounding images of impending doom. Erie makes these worries all go away and four-season travel around the lake should be no less difficult than in a gas-powered car… and certainly much more pleasurable!
If you have destination charging as an option, the Erie Supercharger also partially plugs a large hole in rural New York and Pennsylvania. With a modest 200 mile (as the crow flies) radius centered on the charger you could hypothetically now reach deep into the less populous parts of both states to enjoy their many parks. Or… admittedly, you could drive into the middle of Lake Erie and have range enough to make it back (assuming you’ve first activated submarine mode).
The Hilton Garden Inn, which hosts the Supercharger, is part of a larger facility called the Ambassador Banquet and Conference Center, which includes a Courtyard by Marriott and the Safari Grille. The entire facility is ideal for any road-weary snow birds making their seasonal migration or wedding parties/business meetings full of Tesla owners.
Within easy walking distance of the Supercharger there a lots of food options. A Cracker Barrel beckons for those needing a longer charge, while an Applebee’s and Burger King split the medium and short charging crowd. If you’re willing to brave the pedestrian lights on Peach Street, you can also easily walk to our usual stops, Quaker Steak and Lube. Widen your search zone a little more and the world is your oyster: Steak n’ Shake, Golden Corral, Krispy Kreme, Texas Roadhouse, Eat n’ Park– they’re all accessible by sidewalk. Or you can drive to many more within a mile radius, like our other frequent stop: Famous Dave’s Bar-B-Que.
Other nearby shopping opportunities and amusements are nearly endless. All the big box store companies are represented as well as a movie theater and a family-oriented water park called Splash Lagoon, which is owned by the same parent company as the Hilton Garden Inn.
One of the initial unknowns was how Tesla would lay out the chargers themselves. I’d speculated that given the proximity to campgrounds and the lake that Tesla might make the slots pull-through to allow Model X’s with trailers an easier charge.
Turns out that was wrong, but there is an advantage to the way Tesla has situated these chargers versus most other locations. They ran a curbed peninsula out into the parking lot between two rows of pre-existing parking spots, which effectively gives access to the chargers from both sides. I’m not a math expert, but to me that at least halves the chances of any given charger being blocked by a gas car.
By powering up the Erie Supercharger, Tesla has essentially completed two major routes that touch all four compass points. With the elimination of cold weather as a range concern, Tesla tourists can now whoosh around the northeast with relative ease… with two regional holes yet to fill (and hopefully next): I-80 in Pennsylvania and I-86 in upstate New York.
Maps courtesy of Supercharge.info
Please note: We are not specifically authorized, sponsored by, or otherwise directly associated with Tesla Motors and make no claims to be so.
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.
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.
@herbertong @thejefflutz No, we will build and run the fab. Let there be ZERO doubt about that.
Maybe TSMC subleases part of the Terafab if they want, but nothing more than that.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 7, 2026
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.
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.
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.
Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.
And it will be stunningly beautiful. https://t.co/4NweOqTL7y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026
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.
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.
FIRST ON FOX: Trump will award Elon Musk the National Medal of Science at the White House Thursday.
Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su will also receive the science medal, while Michael Dell and Satya Nadella will receive the technology medal.
It marks Trump’s first time presenting the awards across either administration.
Full story here https://t.co/omnrLV0EwS
— Fox News Politics (@foxnewspolitics) October 7, 2026
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
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.
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.
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.
FSD Supervised preventing T-bone crash
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 6, 2026
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.
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.
Elon Musk shuts down talk of TSMC taking over Terafab
Trump to hand Elon Musk a top honor that traces back to JFK
Tesla FSD changed its mind mid-intersection, and it may have saved a life
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
Tesla Roadster’s new patent preps white-knuckle speeds, keeping it grounded
