Connect with us

Lifestyle

Tesla Model 3s dominate Pikes Peak Exhibition class with twin podium finishes

(Credit: Now You Know/Twitter, Unplugged Performance)

Published

6 years ago

on

This year’s Pikes Peak Hill Climb initially had three Teslas slated to take on the legendary and extremely dangerous mountain. But just like everything in the world of Tesla and Elon Musk, things usually do not turn out as expected. One by one, the treacherous mountain seemingly picked off the Teslas, until there was a day when only one Model 3, driven by two-time Pikes Peak winner Blake Fuller, was running in the qualifiers. 

Yet, as Sunday’s event would show, Fuller and his near-stock Model 3 Performance were not fated to complete the Pikes Peak Hill Climb alone. Thanks to a near-inhuman effort, another Model 3, piloted by veteran racer Randy Pobst and modified by EV tuning house Unplugged Performance, would rise from the dead and get ready for the mountain in time for the race. By the end of the day, the twin Teslas stood at the number one and two positions in the Exhibition class, and the competition was not even close.

Blake Fuller and his Model 3 Performance completed the Pikes Peak Hill Climb in 11:02.802, cementing his place at the top of the Exhibition class. At a close second was Randy Pobst and his repaired Unplugged Performance Model 3 Ascension-R, which completed the run in 11:04.131. The closest competitor was Scott Birdsall, who ranked third in his 1949 Ford F1 with a time of 11:24.065. 

A community-driven victory

What is rather remarkable was that Blake Fuller’s first-place win at Pikes Peak’s Exhibition class was a community effort. In a post-race interview, the veteran racer stated that funding was tight due to the pandemic, but thankfully, the Tesla community rallied together to provide him with a car for the event. A couple donated their Model 3 Performance, and the rest of the expenses were raised by about 150 individuals and private businesses who were willing to help out. 

As noted by Fuller in the interview, the Model 3’s amazing feat this year would not have been possible without help from the Tesla community. Help from notable individuals such as Zac and Jesse from the Now You Know YouTube channel, who spread the word about the community-driven effort, also provided great momentum for Fuller and the Model 3’s participation at this year’s Pikes Peak Hill Climb.

A comeback from the dead

Unplugged Performance went on a roller coaster ride this week. With the father of Track Mode behind the wheel of its modified Model 3 Ascension-R, the UP team and driver Randy Pobst dominated the Exhibition class on the first day of qualifiers. However, tragedy struck on the second day after the Model 3 hit a big bump on the road at speeds that were too high to recover. The car was practically totaled because of the accident, and all signs pointed to dreams of climbing Pikes Peak in the Model 3 Ascension R being over. But this was not to be the case. With sleepless nights and round-the-clock work, the Unplugged team and numerous Tesla community members pitched in to revive the heavily-damaged Model 3. Despite all the odds, the Unplugged team pulled through, and a race-ready Model 3 was ready for Sunday’s event. 

Advertisement
-

The Model 3 Ascension R blazed through the first section of the mountain seven seconds quicker than its sibling, but over the course of the climb, the vehicle experienced battery heating issues that throttled its output. This unfortunately resulted in the Model 3 Ascension R climbing the majority of Pikes Peak at half power. Despite all these headwinds, Randy Pobst was able to complete the run just 2 seconds behind Fuller. That’s pretty admirable for a car that was totaled just a couple days before, and a car whose performance is severely reduced. In a post-race interview, Pobst noted that there is so much more that the Model 3 Ascension R could do, and he hopes to drive the vehicle up the mountain again. “I’ve never driven such a great car at Pikes Peak,” Pobst said. 

The veteran racer is right. In 2019, Pobst took a 2019 Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat up Pikes Peak, finishing second place in the Exhibition class. His time with the over 700-hp Hellcat was 11:57.874, over 50 seconds slower than his throttled, repaired Model 3 Ascension R. 

A warning to gasoline cars

With the impressive performance of Tesla’s electric cars at Pikes Peak this year, the auto industry’s transition to EVs has never been more evident. After all, if a near-stock Model 3 Performance and a repaired, reassembled Model 3 Ascension R could dominate Pikes Peak’s Exhibition class, then there is very little doubt that high-profile motoring events would likely become more and more populated by all-electric cars in the near future. 

Watch Blake Fuller and Randy Pobst’s post-race interviews in the videos below. 

Related Topics:

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.

Advertisement
Comments

Lifestyle

Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley

Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.

Published

2 days ago

on

October 4, 2026

By

Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.

Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.

Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:

“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”

Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.

The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.

Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.

Continue Reading

Lifestyle

Tesla teases “Halloween Mode” update with Optimus rising from a graveyard

Tesla’s Halloween teaser hides a covered vehicle and an Optimus hand rising from the ground.

Published

4 days ago

on

October 2, 2026

By

Tesla has started teasing a Halloween software update for its vehicles, with  a short clip on X that reads, “Halloween is coming.” The clip opens on a glowing pumpkin before pulling back to the car’s center touchscreen, where the usual parked visualization has been replaced by a graveyard scene, and the vehicle draped with a white sheet so it reads as a cartoon ghost.

The second detail is a robotic hand clawing its way out of the dirt like a zombie, which looks to be the hand of Tesla’s latest Optimus V3 humanoid robot. While Tesla still has not formally shown Optimus Gen 3 walking around in service, renders pulled from Tesla’s Android app last month gave the clearest look yet, including far more refined hands that Tesla has said carry 22 degrees of freedom. The hand has been the hardest part of the program. Musk has called it the majority of the robot’s engineering difficulty, and Tesla’s patents describe a design driven by tendons with the actuators moved into the forearm.

Tesla Optimus V3 hand and arm details revealed in new patents

Optimus also has a Halloween track record. Last October the robot handed out candy in Times Square, and a costumed “zombie” Optimus shuffled around the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles on Halloween night.

On the software side, Tesla’s 2025 Holiday Update expanded Santa Mode with a Santa sleigh, snowmen, snow effects, and a festive lock chime, so it wouldn’t be too far fetched if we saw something similar but themed for a  Halloween Mode.

Continue Reading

Lifestyle

Tesla’s newest feature lets you floor it out of a Supercharger while plugged in

Tesla’s new Emergency Drive Away feature lets owners flee a Supercharger while still plugged in.

Published

5 days ago

on

October 1, 2026

By

Tesla has given drivers a way to escape while a vehicle is plugged-in at a Supercharger, in the event of an emergency. The company’s charging team announced a new feature on X called Emergency Drive Away, which lets a driver shift into Drive and pull away while the charging cable is still connected to the car.

Until now, a Tesla would not leave Park with a charge cable plugged in. Drivers had to release the latch from the touchscreen, the Tesla app, or the button on the charge handle, then wait for the port to let go. Emergency Drive Away removes that lockout, but Tesla is clear that it comes at a cost. “Use of this feature will damage your vehicle and the Supercharger,” the company wrote, adding that the function is meant for emergencies only and that deliberate misuse will lead to “additional penalties.” Tesla did not say what those penalties are.


The in-car prompt is just as direct, with the warning reading: “Driving with the cable connected will cause damage to your vehicle and the Supercharger. Short camera recordings will be shared with Tesla.” That footage gives Tesla a way to separate a real emergency from someone who simply did not want to wait for the latch.

The feature requires software update 2026.38.3, and Tesla said in replies to owners that it works at every Supercharger in the United States without new stall hardware. Model S and Model X vehicles built before 2021 are not supported, and the company says the feature applies to U.S. Superchargers “for now,” leaving Canada and other markets out at launch.

Tesla Supercharger argument leads to tragic shooting incident

Tesla did not tie the announcement to any specific event, but it arrives two months after a gunman opened fire at an In-N-Out in Twin Falls, Idaho, on August 1, targeting three people in two Teslas at the neighboring Supercharger. One of them, a 66 year old man from Salt Lake City, was killed. Superchargers have been the scene of violence before, including a fatal shooting at a station near Denver in 2023.

In the weeks after Twin Falls, owners pushed Tesla for a native way to escape a stall, and many pointed back to EVject, the aftermarket breakaway connector Tesla sued in 2024 over claims it lacked overtemperature protection. The two companies later reached an agreement that led EVject to recall its earlier connectors in favor of a version with thermal sensors.

Continue Reading