Lifestyle
Tesla Model 3 declared by 96-year old auto veteran as his favorite car ever
We loved reading the inspirational story about Wesley, age 83, driving his silver metallic Model 3 from California to Florida. My dad Walt Mordenti, age 96, lives in San Francisco. He picked up his red Model 3 (VIN 001388) at the Tesla Factory on December 23, 2017, which possibly makes him the oldest Model 3 owner.
Walt was born in 1921 and began working on cars in 1935 when he needed to help support his family. Since that time, Walt has driven nearly every make and model of American-made cars, and he tells everyone that his Model 3 is by far his favorite car.
Above: Walt picking up his Model 3 at the Tesla Factory (Photo courtesy of Joyce Mordenti)
Walt is a skilled car mechanic, renowned for his knowledge of Hudson automobiles. Some folks refer to him as Doc Hudson, and he was a racing legend in his own right. Walt lived in Connecticut and raced on the East Coast from the 1940s to the 1980s. He is probably best known as an owner/builder/mechanic, who also drove the tow truck and served as the pit crew, usually by himself.
In 1948, he bought a red Kurtis Kraft midget racer with a Ford V8-60 engine. On February 27, 1957, Walt’s #78 Kurtis Kraft midget racer set the fastest time in the Flying Mile on the sands of Daytona Beach with a speed of 118.421 mph, beating the Offenhausers!
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Above: Walt accepting the first-place trophy in 1957 with chauffeur Ronnie Evans at Thompson Speedway, CT; Walt on left, Ronnie on right (Photo courtesy of Ronnie’s son John Evans)
In the 1940s and 50s, he also wrenched on Hudson stock cars with other Waterbury friends: the Mordenti-Mordino-Mambrino trio. I remember the #12 Hudson stock car, affectionately known as The Tank!
Later, when Walt was in his 50s, he added “driver” to his resume at the 1/2-mile high-banked dirt track at Lebanon Valley Speedway, NY in his #36 open-wheel, big-block, AMC-powered, super modified stock car (he used Gremlin and Rambler American bodies, because the body had to match the motor). With great joy, he accepted trophies for rookie of the year and most improved driver!
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Above: Walt sharing a moment with Margaret during one of their cross-country Hudson adventures. Note the vanity plate on his Hudson, “OUR 53 HH.” The gentleman from New York who bought Walt’s Hudson also put a vanity plate on the car—“WALTS 53”—in honor of the famous Hudson mechanic Walt Mordenti (Photo courtesy of Joyce Mordenti)
Between 1992 and 2016, Walt and my mom Margaret made 19 trips across the USA in a 1953 Hudson Hornet that he restored. Walt told friends that he could not drive the Hudson after my mom, his co-pilot of 71 years, passed away in March 2017 at age 94.
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Above: Walt proudly displaying his Tesla vanity plate (Photo courtesy of Joyce Mordenti)
He sold his Hudson in November 2017 to make room in the garage for his Model 3.
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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com by Joyce Mordenti — Joyce contacted us to relay the remarkable story of her 96-year old father, Walt Mordenti, after seeing the story of 83-year old Wesley traveling cross-country in his Model 3.
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Elon Musk
SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app
SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.
SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.
Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.
Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.
Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.
Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.
Lifestyle
Tesla saves its passengers again – This time after a 300-foot cliff fall in Malibu
A Tesla Model 3 fell 300 feet off a Malibu cliff and both passengers survived.
A Tesla Model 3 plunged roughly 300 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Highway in Malibu on Friday morning, May 29, 2026, and both occupants survived. The crash was reported at approximately 7:30 a.m. near the 2500 block of Mulholland Highway, triggering a multi-agency rescue operation involving Malibu Search and Rescue, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and McCormick Ambulance.
When first responders arrived, the male driver was outside the vehicle shouting for help while the female passenger remained pinned inside the Tesla. Rescue crews rappelled down the cliffside on ropes to reach the wreckage. A flight medic was lowered by helicopter to begin treating both victims, and the driver was hoisted up to the roadway before crews used the Jaws of Life to free the trapped passenger. Both were airlifted to a local trauma center with moderate injuries despite a remarkable result for a fall that steep.
The outcome is not surprising, considering Model 3 earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA in every category and sub-category, and recorded the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program. The absence of a traditional engine in the front of the vehicle creates a longer crumple zone that absorbs impact energy before it reaches occupants, and the battery pack running along the floor gives the car an unusually low center of gravity that reinforces structural rigidity.
This is not the first time a Tesla has kept passengers alive after going off a cliff. A Tesla Model Y carrying a family of four survived a plunge off a cliff at Devil’s Slide near San Francisco in January 2023, with two adults and two children walking away from a 250-foot fall. That incident drew widespread attention to how the structural integrity of Tesla’s electric platform performs in extreme crash scenarios that most vehicles would not survive.
Tesla Model Y driver who drove off cliff with family attempts to avoid criminal conviction



