Lifestyle
Tesla Model 3 fan-made commercial invokes the elusive ‘soul’ of electric cars
Tesla fan and filmmaker Jono Seneff once drove his father’s Model S 75D, and it gave him an experience unlike any other. Jono knew the specs of the vehicle prior to his drive, such as its 0-60 mph time, its battery capacity, and its range per charge. But once he stepped on the accelerator, he realized that Tesla’s electric cars are more than just fun facts and figures — they are about that special feeling that one experiences when trying out something new for the first time.
These thoughts formed half of the inspiration behind the filmmaker’s latest project — a fan-made commercial for the Tesla Model 3 recently shared on Jono’s YouTube channel. The 90-second commercial, which would not be out of place beside the best entries in Tesla’s Project Loveday contest last year, deals with the theme of feeling, and of experiencing (and re-experiencing) things. Jono provided some details about his fan-made Model 3 commercial to Teslarati through email, where he discussed the inspiration behind his project, as well as some fun Tesla-themed Easter Eggs he included in the ad.
Jono notes that his fan-made Model 3 commercial was inspired by a dream he once had of a deaf organist blasting music in the desert, as well as his personal experiences with a Model S. A Long Range RWD Model 3 was used as the main vehicle in the ad, and it was shot with the help of volunteers from his fellow USC cinema graduate students. Ultimately, the project took a long time to accomplish, with work starting back in April in and around Los Angeles.
Following is an excerpt from the filmmaker’s message describing the project.
“My dad got the Model S 75D about two years ago. Over the holidays I was able to drive it. Everything that I had read about Tesla – the 0-60 stats, the production process, how the batteries work, all of that just fell away as I was pulling away from the stoplight. There is that inevitable stupid grin that creeps onto your face when you accelerate like that for the first time. This all made me think about what a Tesla commercial should really be about. It’s about feeling something. It’s not about knowing facts and figures; it’s about that uncontrollable stupid grin on your face as you silently accelerate out of a turn.
“I ended up trying to combine that feeling with this deaf Beethoven character from my dreams who longed to experience music again. Beethoven famously would put his body against the piano to feel the vibrations of his late compositions. Although Beethoven and my main character weren’t able to hear music again, they were able to feel it. In the end, the unperformed sheet music or the statistical data on Tesla’s website are ultimately unrelated to that feeling that can only be experienced. And trust me — whipping around the desert in the RWD Model 3 was just that. In fact, the final shot of the spec is actually me in the car by myself just gunning it towards the horizon.”
Jono also mentioned that the commercial includes some fun Easter Eggs related to the company’s other products and one of CEO Elon Musk’s favorite literature. Among these is a Powerwall 2 battery (placed cleverly at the latter half of the commercial), as well as references to characters in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Series.
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This particular fan-made Tesla Model 3 commercial is notable in the way that it invokes that all-elusive “soul” referenced by car enthusiasts about vehicles they are fond of. Being absent of any engine noise, Tesla’s electric cars have been criticized for having no soul by critics. This particular point was highlighted by Porsche in its teaser for the Taycan (formerly known as the Mission E) earlier this year, when the German veteran automaker noted that their upcoming all-electric sedan and Model S competitor would be an electric car with soul.
“All Porsche models have something in common: They have a soul. A certain feeling you get as a driver as soon as you get behind the wheel. Soon, the Porsche Taycan is coming. And although his heart is powered by a different force – electricity – the soul, once again, is the same.”
As this recent fan-made Model 3 commercial shows, Tesla’s vehicles do have a soul, though it is not found in the form of an angry internal combustion engine roaring to life as the driver presses on the accelerator. Rather, it is an entirely different feeling — one that could only be fully understood and experienced behind the wheel of Tesla’s electric cars.
Watch Jono Seneff’s fan-made Tesla Model 3 commercial in the video below.
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.
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.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
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.
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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.
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.
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.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
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
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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.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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