Lifestyle
Tesla Model 3 is undefeated vs the Porsche Taycan Turbo S in Japan’s EV Grand Prix
Back when the Porsche Taycan was unveiled, Elon Musk remarked that the Tesla Model 3 Performance would probably win against the German all-electric sports car in an extended race. The CEO’s statement was bold, and it attracted its own fair share of skepticism. Porsche, after all, has tuned the Taycan in the Nürburgring, and the company’s vehicles are known for being monsters on the track.
Teslas, on the other hand, are known for their strong drag race performance. But on the track, even the company’s flagship vehicle then, the Model S Performance, tended to overheat and throttle its power as the race went on. This issue has since been addressed with the Model S Plaid, of course, but back then, a claim such as the one Musk made — even if the Model 3 Performance was equipped with Track Mode — was very bold.
The ongoing 2021 All-Japan EV Grand Prix Series is steadily proving Elon Musk right. Fresh off the Model 3’s stellar performance in the 2020 Grand Prix, the 2021 series’ EV-1 class was unsurprisingly filled with numerous Model 3s. But this year, the Japan Electric Vehicle Race Association (JEVRA) opted to throw a dark horse of sorts in the Grand Prix — the Porsche Taycan Turbo S. With an output of 560 kW, the Taycan Turbo S was the big dog of this year’s series, exceeding the Tesla Model 3’s output by 200 kW.
The Porsche Taycan Turbo S debuted strongly in the Grand Prix’s first round at the Fuji Speedway, breaking away from the competition in the event’s initial laps. The entire race spanned 55 km (34 miles), and for the first half, the Taycan Turbo S absolutely dominated. A Tesla Model 3 Performance with Unplugged Performance parts from Team Taisan tailed the German sports car, but it was still a few seconds behind, losing to the German sports car in the straights. Yet midway through the race, which incidentally coincided with the length of the Nurburgring, the Taycan Turbo S lost significant power, allowing the Tesla Model 3 Performance to overtake it and win the event.
In an interview after the race, the Taycan Turbo S driver described his experience. According to the racer, the all-electric sports car was amazing for about the length of the Nürburgring, but beyond that point, the vehicle’s power loss was significant. He then noted that he and his team at Gulf Racing would do what they can to mitigate the Taycan Turbo S’ power loss issues.
“I opened the window of the very fun electric racing world. I think we still need more and more technological innovation. I think it was a very disappointing result for Porsche fans. I think Porsche did it until they ran the Nürburgring. Beyond that, Porsche has not yet been able to set up for the world beyond 25 km. This is a fact, so it will be improved more and more from now on. I’m sure RS will come out after Turbo S. I want them to send information to Weissach and set it up. We (will) also consider some measures. Thank you,” the driver said.
The second round of the 2021 All-Japan EV Grand Prix was held at the Sodegaura Forest Raceway, and the results were much of the same. The Taycan dominated the first ten laps of the 23-lap, 55-km race, but on the 11th lap, the vehicle lost power once more. This allowed two Tesla Model 3s — one with Unplugged Performance parts and another fitted with Mountain Pass Performance parts — to overtake the Taycan Turbo S in dramatic fashion. The rest of the race was quite shocking, as every Tesla Model 3, including one that seemed to be nearly stock, overtook the Taycan Turbo S.
By the end of the race, Team Taisan’s Tesla Model 3 with Unplugged Performance parts stood in first place, followed by the other four Model 3s in the event. The Porsche Taycan Turbo S, due to its throttling issue, came in at 6th place. Possibly due to these results, the Gulf Racing team adopted a new strategy for the Grand Prix’s third round, which was held last month at the Tsukuba Circuit.
The 2021 All-Japan EV Grand Prix Series’ third round was another 55 km race, and it involved 12 laps around the famous racetrack. This time around, Gulf Racing took its time with the Porsche Taycan Turbo S, pacing itself instead of accelerating like a bat out of hell from the start of the race. This proved quite useful, as the vehicle lasted longer than in the previous two rounds. However, the seemingly inevitable power loss issue emerged once more at the 10th lap.
Because of this, the Porsche Taycan Turbo S never managed to catch Team Taisan’s Model 3 with Unplugged Performance parts, which ended the race in first place once more. This marked the 100th career victory for Yasutsune “Ricky” Chiba, the founder of Team Taisan, as well as Unplugged Performance, whose Tesla tuning capabilities are becoming more and more recognized. Following the Unplugged Model 3 were six other Teslas, one of them being from Gulf Racing.
The 2021 All-Japan EV Grand Prix’s fourth round was recently held at the Sugo International Racing Course. Similar to the other races, the event was a 55-km track race over 16 laps. Team Taisan’s Tesla Model 3 with Unplugged Performance parts proved undefeated by winning the race once more. While the JEVRA has not uploaded a video of the 2020 EV Grand Prix’s fourth round yet, results published in the event’s official website note that the Gulf Racing and its Porsche Taycan Turbo S did not race.
What is rather remarkable is that video feeds from the Model 3s in the races showed that the vehicles’ batteries eventually heated up as well, which meant that for the latter laps, even the Teslas were throttled to some degree. Yet despite these, the Model 3s were still able to soundly beat the Taycan Turbo S, suggesting that Porsche’s power reduction was more prominent than those experienced by its more humble, more affordable competitors.
Watch the first three rounds of the 2021 All-Japan EV Grand Prix in the videos below.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to tips@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.
The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”
MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.
Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.
Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here.
Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start?
And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August! pic.twitter.com/TTrMql2aRg
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) June 17, 2026
It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.
Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.
With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.
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.
Tesla faces Full Self-Driving pushback in EU over ‘speeding’
Tesla teases greater Grok FSD integration and ‘Banish’ feature ‘in about 3 months’
