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Tesla Model S shows 5-star safety rating in scary 18-wheeler accident

Credit: Twitter | @RebuildsRich

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A Tesla Model S was destroyed after a collision with an 18-wheeler nearly tore the electric sedan to shreds. However, the two passengers inside escaped from the accident with some injuries, but their lives completely intact.

Reddit user u/quarm813 share photographs of his Model S P90D on Sunday, August 9, to the r/TeslaMotors subreddit. The incident occurred on Friday, July 31, the original poster said.

YouTuber Rich Rebuilds shared a video of the demolished electric car via his Twitter account.

https://twitter.com/RebuildsRich/status/1292776536630845440

According to u/quarm813, the Model S P90D was using Autopilot while navigating down the highway. However, when driving in the fast lane, an 18-wheeler swerved into the area of the road where the Tesla was driving.

The driver of the Tesla swerved to avoid contact with the tractor-trailer, but it was too late. “I grabbed the wheel and tried to avoid the 18 wheeler,” quarm said. “The rear guard rail on the 18 wheeler caught the front of the car and cut the entire driver-side off. The only way I can explain it is it looked like it was done with a lightsaber.”

Quarm indicated that they had suffered a severely broken arm that required multiple surgeries to repair. However, his focus was on his daughter, who was asleep at the time of the incident.

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“My daughter was asleep in the rear seat. She got six stitches in her knee,” quarm indicated in a Reddit posting.

The severity of the accident can be seen in the numerous photographs that quarm shared with the r/TeslaMotors community.

Quarm indicated that both the passengers in the vehicle were able to walk away without emergency authorities using any sort of apparatuses, such as the Jaws of Life, to remove them from the car.

After the accident, quarm states that he was in the process of buying a new car, and that he was undecided between a Tesla Model S P100D or a Model Y. Ultimately, Tesla helped deliver the new electric vehicle to Quarm while he was still in the hospital.

“Did you know that Tesla will do a contactless delivery to the hospital? Tesla delivered a 2020 Y to the hospital for me,” he said.

Quarm indicated that they had ordered the car before arriving at the hospital, and Tesla had delivered it to the hospital because they had no other way to get home after receiving medical attention.

The survival of the two passengers is a testament to the safety of Tesla’s vehicles, especially the Model S.

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Crash safety tests from the NHTSA have given the company’s flagship sedan a five-star rating in Overall Safety, Frontal and Side Crashes, and Rollover protection, putting it among one of the safest vehicles in its class.

The fact that two people emerged from the Model S with their lives is an incredible feat. Tesla vehicles have saved many lives over the years, but this could perhaps be the company’s most impressive feat to date.

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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Tesla wins three-year standoff against Sweden’s IF Metall union

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Credit: Tesla Europe and Middle East | X

Sweden’s IF Metall union has announced that it is ending all protests against Tesla, effective immediately.

The union said in a statement this morning:

“There seems to be no limits to the length Tesla would go to keep unions out of their operations. Unfortunately, they have managed to pay their way out in Sweden. At least that has given the former IF Metall members more money in their pocket, but the insecurity of not having a union or a collective agreement still remains.”

IF Metall has been after Tesla in Sweden for the past three years, attempting to push unionized operations into its factories. Tesla, on the other hand, has given its employees the chance to unionize in various markets. However, the organization says that Tesla has “bought out all of its striking members.”

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“Today, we end our industrial action against Tesla. We do so because it can no longer have an effect – not because our principles have changed,” a written statement said.

Over the past three years, IF Metall has definitely been a thorn in the side of Tesla and its operations in Sweden. The primary strike started in October 2023, when IF Metall members at Tesla’s Swedish Service Centers refused to work.

IF Metall chair to Elon Musk: “Give us a chance” as Tesla Sweden strike hits 2 years

Strikes extended to blockades and work stoppages at non-Tesla-owned repair shops that service Teslas. This limited and stopped anything related to warranties, transport damage, and other work on Teslas ending, eliminating work arounds for customers.

Sympathy strikes followed, as postal workers, dock workers, electricians, and other tradesmen stopped working. Add in lawsuits and other pressures, and you get the full scope of what strategies the union has used against Tesla over the past several years.

But now, it’s all over.

“We will continue to defend the right of workers to organize. We will continue to fight for collective bargaining. And we will continue to stand in solidarity with workers and trade unions facing similar challenges elsewhere – just as you have stood with us,” IF Metall said.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming

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Credit: Grok Imagine

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.

Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”

The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.

However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.

Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package

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But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.

In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:

“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?’”

However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.

Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:

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“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”

Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.

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SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff

Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.

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Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.

The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.

Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.

Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry

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None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.

The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.

Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.

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