Lifestyle
The Tesla Dilemma: Texas or Tulsa
When news broke that Tesla had announced the finalists for its next Gigafactory, which actually could be called a Terafactory based on the expected cell production output from the facility, comparisons between Austin, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma was rampant across social media. Each location has its own distinct advantage and disadvantage, which I’ll explore.
I will start with Austin, Texas, because of the location’s notoriety as the “favorite” of the two locations. Also, it is fairly evident that Elon seems to think highly of the Lone Star State based on his Tweets about the state and also the presence of his SpaceX business there.
Texas has a lot of available lands, and it’s very cheap. Houses and businesses can get the same amount of land in Texas that they can in California, but at a significantly cheaper price. Tesla could save a lot of money on the purchase price of the land and it could be using Tulsa as leverage to get an even better deal on the Texas property.
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One of my favorite reasons for a Texas Factory is the fact that the state has long been the heart of oil and gas, and the world’s largest electric automaker in the same region. I find that to hysterical to me. I feel that Tesla establishing its largest and most dominant production facility in that area would be a big “middle finger” to the pollution-causing gas and oil drillers who, for a long time, have called Texas home.
Texas also has a hearty history of automotive manufacturing and is ranked fourth out of all fifty U.S. states in the sector. Also, Tesla could provide a stable economic boost to the State. While this also applies to Tulsa, Texas already has a strong presence in automotive manufacturing, which could ease regulations and transition time in the state.
Texas is also home to SpaceX’s Boca Chica Launch Facility. This statement solidifies Musk’s presence in the state and makes it an already familiar option for the CEO’s other company.
However, Tulsa has its own array of advantages, a lot of which are similar to Texas but in a slightly different way.
Tulsa also offers a sizeable amount of affordable land that Tesla could use for its next production facility. Although the company has roots in Texas and not in Tulsa, local authorities are ready to make a strong push for Tesla, knowing that the electric automaker could provide a substantial positive economic injection into the state’s employment rate.
Tulsa is also slightly more centralized than Austin, as it is closer to the geographical center of the country. While it may not provide much of an advantage as far as location goes, it is slightly more centralized than Austin is.
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I also feel like Tulsa may want the factory a little bit more than Austin. I could be wrong here, because what city wouldn’t want a manufacturing plant that will provide 12,000+ with jobs and provide a positive economic impact? But Tulsa took a statue of an oil driller and put Tesla’s logo on it, and I feel like that is pretty special in itself considering the city’s rich roots in oil drilling. It is especially impressive that the local figures in Tulsa are willing to sit there and modify a very notable statue in the area to woo Tesla in their direction.
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Simply enough, it’s pretty obvious that Texas is the favored choice. At least it is for me. While Tulsa does have its advantages, it just doesn’t seem like it would provide enough benefits that make it a clear favorite over Texas. Elon has also mentioned Texas on numerous occasions like I previously mentioned, and really, economically, I think it provides more benefits to Tesla as a company.
What do you think?
I’d also like to add that there were plenty of great emails last week that I received after sending out the Fremont piece. Thanks for being sure to send me messages. I really appreciate the feedback and I love the fact that whether you agree or disagree, you’re telling me your thoughts. Thanks again!
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Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
Tesla finally got its Nevada Robotaxi Permit but with a few catches hard to miss
Tesla launches Powerwall Lease for affordable home backup
