Lifestyle
Tesla Model S P100D drops in on Volkswagen event to casually destroy competition on the drag strip
A panda-painted Tesla Model S P100D recently made an appearance at a Volkswagen festival in the UK, battling two high-performance vehicles in the quarter mile. The Volkswagen event, dubbed Bug Jam 32, was held at the Santa Pod Raceway in Podington, Bedfordshire, England, a location popular for 1/8-mile and 1/4-mile drag races. In a video shared on YouTube by auto enthusiast channel VeeDubRacing, the electric family sedan could be seen casually crushing its German-made competitors without breaking a sweat.
The Model S P100D competed against two opponents — a Volkswagen Golf R and what appears to be a tuned Volkswagen Corrado. The matchup between the two ICE-powered vehicles and the Model S was almost humorous, since the all-electric car looked completely out of place in the event, which was populated by smoking Volkswagens from both past and present.
The first Volkswagen that went up against the Model S P100D was a Golf R hatchback, a lightweight, high-performance car. The Golf R is one of Volkswagen’s most popular vehicles, having won multiple awards such as the 2015 North American Car of the Year, 2015 Motor Trend Car of the Year, 2013 European Car of the Year, and the 2013 World Car of the Year. Just like popular Japanese-bred tuner cars like the Nissan GT-R, the Volkswagen Golf R could be modified into a race monster under expert hands. Popular auto publication Jalopnik, for one, once featured a heavily-tuned Golf R with an insane engine output of 470 hp from its 2.0-liter turbocharged FSI Inline-four engine. According to the publication, the tuned, 470-hp Golf R was powerful enough to surprise even the most capable of drivers.
Another Volkswagen that engaged the Model S P100D on the quarter-mile appeared to be a tuned VW Corrado. The Corrado was in production from 1988-1995, and is one of the German carmaker’s most memorable drivers’ cars to date. The 3-door, front-wheel-drive vehicle was quite advanced when it was released, including features such as an active rear spoiler that raises automatically when the car exceeds 50 mph. The Corrado VR6, the brand’s top-tier variant, is noted for its rather sizable 2.9-liter, 12-valve VR6 engine, which occupied roughly the same space as a conventional 4-cylinder engine. Just like the Golf R, the Corrado was critically acclaimed, with Auto Express describing it as “one of Volkswagen’s best-ever drivers’ cars.” British publication Car magazine also gave the Corrado VR6 a spot in its list of “25 Cars You Must Drive Before You Die.”
Racing pedigree and history aside, the Golf R and the Corrado were up against an all-electric drag racing beast capable of humiliating actual supercars on the strip. The Tesla Model S P100D finished its run against the Golf R in 11.43 seconds while traveling at a speed of 116.71 mph, beating the Volkswagen’s 13.91 seconds and 103.30 mph. The P100D’s run against the Corrado ended in similar fashion, with the family sedan finishing the quarter-mile in 11.40 seconds, more than two seconds faster than the Volkswagen’s 13.88 seconds.
While the Model S P100D and Model X P100D have already established themselves as electric legends on the drag strip with their capability to outrun supercars in the quarter-mile, Tesla’s latest high-performance vehicle — the Model 3 Performance — seems set to make waves on the track. Based on initial reviews of the vehicle, the Model 3 Performance, particularly when its Track Mode feature is enabled, is a car that can very well shake the high-performance sedan echelons in the auto industry.
Watch the Model S P100D take on the Volkswagen duo in the video below.
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.
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.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
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.
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.
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.
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.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
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.
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.
Lifestyle
Police sergeant recounts his Neuralink journey with Elon Musk’s brain chip
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
