Lifestyle
Tesla and fully autonomous cars will change your life
In the past decade new technology has brought about many big changes. The pace of that change has been exponential. But you’d better buckle up because we’re on the verge of another major one: autonomous cars. And while you may be tired of new technology being called “disruptive”, it really is the best way to describe the kind of change autonomous cars are about to bring about.
What could our daily lives be like in the years ahead for owners of full self-driving Teslas?
Today, you might use your Model S or Model X to get to work, where it sits in a parking lot until it’s time to come home. But with full self-driving capabilities, a Tesla could pick you up, drop you off, and even carpool the kids, all without human guidance. Autonomous vehicles can easily shuttle passengers between gaps in transit routes — and even take them door-to-door. With this level of autonomy, passengers might not need to own a car at all — they’ll just order a car when they need one, and it will drive itself over to help out.
But the possibilities for autonomous vehicles don’t stop there. Right now Tesla is developing software that will allow your car to be useful even when you’re not using it. In the future, you might be able to send your autonomous vehicle out independently to act as an autonomous taxi or delivery vehicle and earn you money.
Ultimately this could all change the way we own and use cars. For many, cars might stop being prized (and expensive) possessions. And car “ownership” may become more like a service or utility, like electricity and home internet.
Historically, cars have had a massive impact on the physical world. How will autonomous cars affect the environment?
Autonomous cars may well end up reducing the need to own a car. Many will rideshare for cost or convenience, reducing the number of cars-per-household and leading to fewer cars on the road overall.
Fewer cars means less traffic, less noise, and streets that are calmer and safer.
Street parking, parking structures, and even the suburban two-car garage could become things of the past. That will not only free up real estate, allowing for more greenery (which will obviously help the environment), but less concrete means less heat being reflected into the atmosphere, and that will help cool down cities (and, potentially, the world as a whole).
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Shared or reduced vehicle ownership and more efficient use of vehicles generally (through ridesharing, ride hailing, more convenient use of transit, more efficient traffic flow/patterns capable through autonomous vehicles, etc.) will also have positive environmental effects.
In short, autonomous cars aren’t just offering a change in the way we drive, they are offering the potential for much bigger changes — and much greener changes.
What does the “autonomous future” offer in terms of safety?
Many technologies associated with autonomous driving are already common in today’s cars. In 2014 European regulations required all new vehicles to include autonomous emergency brake systems. We also have technology such as dozing driver alarms, active cruise control, and lane keeping assist. Combined, these technologies are already significantly reducing the number and severity of accidents. One study in France estimated a 15% reduction in fatal pedestrian accidents and a 38% reduction in pedestrian accidents with serious injury. This equates to thousands of lives saved every year.
Data from the NHTSA’s 2008 National Motor Vehicle Crash Causation Survey shows that 93% of crashes are caused by “human error” and “driver error”. Does this mean we will see a 93% reduction in vehicle accidents when autonomous vehicles are the norm? Time will tell, but there is little doubt there will be a significant reduction in accidents as we are already seeing with the driver assist technologies in vehicles today.
And, of course, all this is just the beginning.
Autonomous cars will be packed with a suite of sensors that will be far more accurate and attentive than the human senses. They will have a constantly-updated picture of everything around the car at all times, be able to process this data at lightning speed, and be able to react more quickly than humans, basing decisions on more data than a human driver could ever hope to have.
Eventually autonomous cars will be able to communicate with one another in real time, coordinating their actions in an emergency. This could mean predicting and avoiding an accident – even if it occurs many cars ahead. The future for safety in autonomous cars has a great deal of potential.
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However, there are also interesting debates about the ethics of autonomous vehicle technology. These include debates about what an autonomous vehicle might do in a situation where the car needs to choose between two bad options – like hitting a pedestrian or another vehicle – where both options could result in tragedy.
One thing we can expect is a gap in the perception of safety. Older drivers will probably be more suspicious of the technology than younger drivers. This has been the case with every new technology throughout history, so we should expect it with autonomous cars as well. Newer drivers are more likely to embrace new technology and accept it as normal. Once this perspective is fully adopted, car designs could be changed more dramatically. We have already seen concept cars with inward facing seats, where people could connect or catch up on work while driving. In this environment, EVE for Tesla shows us how connected, autonomous cars could allow us to re-capture lost time in our vehicles, by making the vehicle as connected as your home computer – and more.
EVE for Tesla Dashboard
It certainly sounds like a lot of changes. How long will it take before all this happens?
In some ways, the future is already here, as advanced autonomous technology is already appearing in today’s cars. And Tesla will have fully autonomous technology available next year… or maybe the following, by the time it gets through regulators.
But generally it’s going to be a gradual process spanning decades. As late as the 1940s it wouldn’t have been unusual to see horse-drawn wagon on city streets, and car-only suburbs hadn’t been invented yet. It took a very long time for society to really adapt to cars. So while some very aggressive forecasts think the autonomous future is only a decade away, that future may include mixed technology co-existing for some time.
Today’s car buyers, though, are already seeing the benefits of autonomous technology, and more and more people are expected to get on board. I have a four-year-old son who loves cars, but by the time he turns sixteen there’s a good chance he won’t get a driver’s license — not because he won’t be allowed, but because he might not need it.
The future of driving is going to be very different from what we’re used to, thanks to the adoption of self-driving cars. And the impacts will likely extend far beyond roads and parking alone. So hang on tight – ‘cuz it’s going to be quite a ride!
-Jason Taylor
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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.
Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
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