Lifestyle
Tesla for a vaccine: Doctor offers the ultimate COVID-19 vaccination incentive
A family physician in Buffalo, New York, is attempting to incentivize the COVID-19 vaccine by giving away a Tesla in a raffle. Normal raffle prizes usually won’t top this one, as a flashy and high-tech Tesla will be the prize for one lucky winner who is willing to get vaccinated.
Dr. Raul Vazquez of Urban Family Practice in Buffalo, New York, had an idea to bring awareness to and hopefully encourage more people to get the COVID-19 vaccine: Everyone who gets vaccinated will be entered into a raffle and the winner will get a new Tesla.
“It’s behavioral economics,” Dr. Vazquez, who opened Urban Family Practice in 1996, said to Buffalo Business First. “It’s one car, but it will get everyone motivated, and it’s not a big investment.” He told Teslarati that, as a believer in global climate change, this was the perfect incentive as electric cars give off zero emissions.
Dr. Raul Vazquez, M.D. F.A.A.F.P.
Urban Family Health partnered with Buffalo Public Schools to set up units at city schools in order to expand the rollout of the vaccine in their region. The “pop-ups,” as an Urban Family Practice employee referred to them to Teslarati, can deliver 500 shots per day. Raffle tickets will be given when participants get their second vaccination shot, meaning that the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are available for patients. So far, Dr. Vazquez has administered over 7,000 vaccines personally. “It’s so important to get the immunity levels up,” he said. “There’s a lot of hesitancy with the vaccine, especially since the Johnson and Johnson blood clot reports. But next week, hopefully, the FDA will give the Pfizer vaccine permanent approval, which will be great for vaccines.”
According to Our World in Data, a site that provides COVID-19 vaccination statistics to Google, over 247 million doses of the vaccine have been given in the United States, so far. 32.1% of the population is fully vaccinated. Over 1.18 billion doses have been given globally, and 280 million people have been vaccinated fully. This only equates to 3.6% of the population, however.
The vehicle being given away will be a Tesla Model 3, the company’s most popular vehicle in terms of sales over the past several years. The Model 3 was Tesla’s first mass-market vehicle and launched the automaker into the mainstream. The car can be attributed as the vehicle that really set the transition to electrification into motion as sales of the Model 3 caused plenty of disruption to automakers who produce gas vehicles. The Model 3 has encouraged large automakers like Volkswagen, GM, and others to begin making electric powertrains.
“I know that there will be concerns with charging, so I will probably put a charger in at one of the offices,” Vazquez detailed. He currently has two offices in Buffalo but four locations in total, he told us.
Later today, he will visit two more high schools in an attempt to administer more vaccinations. Students at South Park and Hutch Tech, two Buffalo-area schools, will have the opportunity to receive vaccinations if they chose so, and as a result, they will be entered into the raffle.
Dr. Vazquez’s main reason behind the Tesla vaccination incentive is to get young people vaccinated while adding an additional incentive with a high-tech and relevant piece of pop culture that many people in younger generations find interest in. “Tesla is very popular with the younger crowd,” Dr. Vazquez said. “This Tesla giveaway, it’s something drastic, but the virus is affecting these age groups the most, and it’s important to get the vaccinations out in any way I can.”
The raffle was undoubtedly geared toward younger people, but if they are chosen in the raffle, Vazquez said their parents would receive the car.
What do you think about the vaccine incentive? Let us know in the comments, or you can email me personally at joey@teslarati.com or Tweet me @KlenderJoey.
For a century, the car has asked the same thing of its owner, which is basically to pay attention. Even the best ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft only moved the problem into someone else’s hands. You stopped driving, but you still sat in a stranger’s car, while half listening, and wondering whether to take a phone call in the car without being rude. The Cybercab has no wheel, no pedals and no driver. With Grok @bot now live inside it, it becomes something else entirely, and I think that matters more than the fleet count that everyone is tracking.
Grok @bot is an agent, not a voice assistant. A rider signs in once, and from then on can say what they need and watch it happen. Order dinner from a favorite restaurant. Fill the grocery cart. Move money, answer email, adjust a calendar, push a work project forward. Tesla engineer Yun-Ta Tsai confirmed it is enabled across every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y fleet, and Tesla’s own pitch is that Full Self-Driving handles the commute while Grok handles the errands.
Think about what that does to a thirty minute ride. Uber sells you a trip, while Waymo sells you the same trip in a more private setting. Tesla is selling the thirty minutes themselves, returned to you with an assistant attached. Errands that used to eat a Saturday get done between pickup and drop off. The ride stops being dead time between two places and becomes a place of its own.
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
Best of all, your Bots follow you into any Cybercab, and presumably your own Tesla, then logs you out automatically when you step out. Anyone can bolt a chatbot onto a screen, but much harder to own the vehicle, the autonomy stack and the assistant at once. It also quietly ties SpaceX’s Super Intelligence business to Tesla’s fleet, after Tesla converted its xAI stake into SpaceX equity. The relationship between those two companies is getting harder to describe as separate.
This is also where the hard questions start, because an agent that can spend your money in a vehicle other people also ride in needs some answers. How does it handle a voice it shouldn’t trust? What gets recorded, who can see it, and for how long? What happens when a rider leaves halfway through a task?
If Tesla gets those answers right, the scoreboard changes. We have been counting Cybercabs and wait times. The more telling number may be what riders accomplish per trip. That is data almost no one else will ever have, and it is the real reason to watch Grok @bot.
What do you think? Leave me a comment.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s mirrorless Cybercab will give riders a visibility upgrade
Tesla engineer confirms Cybercab update letting riders pull up rear and repeater cameras on demand.
Tesla is working on a Cybercab update that would let passengers pull up the vehicle’s rear and side cameras on demand, and the request came straight from a rider.
The exchange played out on X late Friday. Cybercab rider Dan Burkland shared photos of the two-seater’s cabin screen after an evening ride, praised the UI team’s work, and left one request: let riders open the rear and repeater cameras whenever they want, “especially for peace of mind.” Tesla UI software engineer Evan (@CarCoder) answered with two words: “In development.”
The Tesla UI team absolutely crushed it with the infotainment software. Nicely done @CarCoder!
One feature request: Allow folks to pull up the rear & repeater cameras on demand. This would be great especially for peace of mind. https://t.co/mNAOSLx6pE
— Dan Burkland (@DBurkland) October 10, 2026
The idea fits a pattern Teslarati has tracked since public rides began. Days after paid Cybercab service opened in Austin, Tesla sent riders a survey that asked them to rate the touchscreen, the app and the cabin, and to pick the features they wanted most. We reported on that survey in September, and a camera view is the kind of small software change Tesla can push quickly if riders keep asking.
It also speaks to something unique about the vehicle. With no steering wheel, no pedals and no driver, passengers have no mirror to check and no way to see behind them. The hardware is clearly built for camera awareness, from the repeater cameras to the rear camera. Letting a passenger look through those same cameras would give a nervous first time rider a way to confirm what is around the car.
The timing matters because the fleet is growing fast. Tesla’s Robotaxi account said on Saturday that more than 300 Cybercabs are now serving Austin, an eightfold increase in 30 days, and Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy named Dallas as the next city. More cars and more cities mean more people riding in a driverless vehicle for the first time, which is exactly when small trust features carry weight.
For now, the feature is confirmed only as in development. If Tesla follows its usual pattern with Cybercab software, riders could see it appear in a point release without any announcement, and Teslarati will watch for it.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s surprise addition to the X Takeover lineup has fans talking
Elon Musk will join Saturday’s X Takeover at Giga Texas for a live virtual interview.
Elon Musk will join X Takeover at Giga Texas on Saturday for a live virtual interview, according to Sawyer Merritt, who shared the news late Thursday. Musk will not be on stage in Austin. The conversation is set to stream for free on the @teslaownersSV account on X.
Organizers had kept expectations in check. In a September update, Tesla Owners Silicon Valley said Musk had appeared at the event twice before but was not promising a third appearance, even as fans hoped he would walk the Giga Texas grounds in person. A virtual spot matches 2024, when Musk gave a surprise interview of about an hour to the crowd in San Luis Obispo, as Teslarati reported at the time.
Wasn’t expecting this 🫡
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) October 9, 2026
This year’s edition is a first in several ways. It is the first X Takeover held outside California and the first at a Tesla facility, with tickets selling out in eight days. Tesla provides the venue, but the event is produced independently by Tesla Owners Silicon Valley. The main event runs from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. CT, followed by a drone and light show at 9 p.m. Maye Musk is the keynote speaker, Franz von Holzhausen is set for a virtual keynote, and Nicki Minaj is the special guest. Joe Tegtmeyer, whose drone footage Teslarati used to track the Optimus factory steel frame at Giga Texas, is also on the speaker list.
Musk’s interview topics have not been revealed, but the backdrop is busy. Tesla doubled its Cybercab fleet in Austin in late September, and last week Musk explained why Robotaxi hours only moved from 10 p.m. to 11 p.m.. Merritt also reported Thursday that Texas DMV records now show 319 registered Cybercabs, up from 169. NHTSA’s deadline for Tesla’s sworn answers on Cybercab certification is October 30, and Tesla reports third quarter earnings on October 21.
Fans who cannot make it to Austin can watch the livestream on X. Musk tends to say more in unscripted settings than he does in prepared remarks, which is the reason this one is worth having open on Saturday.
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