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).
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.
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
Lifestyle
Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory
Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.
Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.
The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.
Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory
Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.
Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
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