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By Miles’ Tesla insurance service ensures fair coverage for UK-based EV owners

(Credit: By Miles)

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With one in ten cars now sold in the UK being electric, the revolution of the private transportation sector is undeniable. Electric cars are here, and at their forefront are tech-focused, always-connected vehicles like the Tesla Model 3, an EV that ranked among the UK’s most popular new cars in 2019. With this in mind, it’s essential that an always-connected and purpose-built insurance policy, specifically designed to cover these cars, exists. This is where UK-based insurance provider By Miles comes into the picture.

By Miles offers a unique, custom policy model for lower mileage Tesla drivers in the UK. The company has launched the world’s first connected car insurance policy which takes information about the distance driven directly from Teslas to work out how much premium to charge, eliminating the need to install any hardware or software in the car.  The company’s concept is simple: Tesla owners are charged by the mile, regardless of how they drive their vehicles. Owners that drive under 7,000 miles a year could end up paying significantly less with a By Miles custom-built Tesla policy, compared to a more traditional car insurance policy.

“With a pay-by-mile policy from By Miles, the less you drive, the less you pay.”

Tesla owners are sure to enjoy the simplicity and features of a By Miles policy, which includes instant self-serve policy changes, a ‘Find My Car’ feature to help track down their Tesla if it’s stolen (or if they forget where they’ve parked) and much more. The setup process is all done online, allowing a Tesla owner to link their car to their By Miles account in seconds. The app also gives owners a transparent overview of their policy, allowing them to keep track of the miles they’ve driven each day. A By Miles connected car insurance policy also covers the battery and charging cable theft, as well as guaranteed repairs for five years using Tesla-approved garages. The policies are underwritten by experienced insurer La Parisienne Assurances, which is backed by Swiss Re.

Pay-by-mile Tesla insurance coverage (Credit: By Miles)

Traditional insurers in the UK still have a long way to go when it comes to effectively insuring smart, electric cars like Teslas. Unlike Californian drivers, who currently have the option of getting covered by Tesla’s own insurance, owners in the UK are obliged to approach third-party providers for their vehicles’ coverage. Unfortunately, some of these providers haven’t updated their policies to take into account the smart safety features or technology offered by electric cars, resulting in unfair premiums that don’t fully cater to these high tech, high-powered cars.

In a press release, By Miles noted that a Tesla Model 3 could, at times, receive a £2,000 quote for their coverage in the UK, which is pretty steep, especially if you’re a lower mileage driver. With a pay-by-mile policy from By Miles, the less you drive, the less you pay.

“A fairer kind of car insurance. Purpose built for Teslas.” – By Miles

These outdated insurance policies regularly cause challenges for Tesla owners in Europe, such as a Model X owner whose vehicle was deliberately set on fire by vandals last year. Partly because the vehicle survived the incident and was still drivable despite being burned, the owner’s insurance provider denied declaring the Model X a total loss. This was despite a Tesla Service Center observing that the Model X’s cabin might already be compromised since chemicals from the cooling system seemed to have entered the interior. The Model X’s owner and the insurance provider are currently in a potential legal conflict.

James Blackham, the co-founder of By Miles, noted that the company aims to make car insurance fairer for Tesla drivers. “Our policy is the first connected car insurance policy in the world, and the first to offer pay-by-mile cover without the need for any external technology like a black box or smartphone. We’re going totally trackerless. Tesla drivers have been getting a raw deal on car insurance, mostly because the old fashioned big insurers don’t understand their cars. But we think Tesla owners should be rewarded for making an eco-friendly choice,” he said.

By Miles offers fully comprehensive car insurance that’s purpose-built for Teslas. To date, they’ve insured almost 30 million miles and are rated ‘Excellent’ on Trustpilot. They were voted the UK’s Best Car Insurance Provider in 2019 at the Insurance Choice Awards.

Tesla owners interested in adopting By Miles’ Tesla insurance coverage can click here for a free quote.

An overview of By Miles’ Tesla insurance coverage could be found below.

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Elon Musk

India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update

Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.

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Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.

On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.

India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.

Elon Musk shares details on X vs. Brazil conflict

The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.

This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.

Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.

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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.

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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.”

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.

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.

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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.

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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.


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

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.

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