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Tesla for a vaccine: Doctor offers the ultimate COVID-19 vaccination incentive

Credit: David Davies | YouTube

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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 toldΒ 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 toΒ 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 toΒ 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.

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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.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration

Tesla is now shipping Cybercabs from Giga Texas with Starlink hardware built in as standard.

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tesla cybercab with no manual controls showing a movie with two employees inside

Tesla’s Cybercabs are now leaving Gigafactory Texas with Starlink hardware on the rear hatch in significant numbers, according to drone footage captured Tuesday by longtime Austin drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. Production at the factory ramped back up after the Labor Day weekend, and his flyover of the outbound lot showed rows of gold Cybercabs alongside Model Y Long Wheelbase units, many carrying the satellite module for the first time as standard equipment rather than a one off retrofit.

Tesla first showed Starlink built into an actual Cybercab on August 10, when the Robotaxi account posted images of a single gold unit with the antenna integrated into the roofline above the taillights and called it the first Cybercab with Starlink integration. That followed a July reveal where Tesla and Starlink jointly posted a cutaway diagram of the antenna placement without a working vehicle to back it up. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software, said at the time that the connection isn’t required for the car to drive itself. It exists mainly for navigation, customer service and keeping tabs on the fleet.

Musk has made a different case in public. During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, he said the company can’t afford robotaxis stranded in what he called “Bermuda Triangles of lack of cellular connectivity,” and he separately claimed on X that Starlink will eventually reach every Tesla built, calling it the only way to deliver high bandwidth to billions of vehicles. He has also pitched the antenna as an entertainment upgrade, telling riders they would be able to stream 4K video or play games during a trip.

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The rollout has moved fast since. Robotaxi service opened to the public in Austin on September 3, and Cybercabs had already been spotted with Starlink hardware in Houston and near Miami International Airport in the weeks before Tuesday’s factory footage showed the module shipping at volume rather than on scattered test units. Whether the satellite link earns its keep is still an open question. Tesla’s unsupervised service currently runs in dense metro geofences in Texas and Florida, markets where cellular coverage is already strong, which is not where the rural dead zones Musk describes tend to show up.

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Lifestyle

Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory

Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.

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Tesla Cybertruck construction site

Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.

The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.

The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory

Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.

Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years

Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.

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Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.

In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.

The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.

Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.

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This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.

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