Lifestyle
Tesla Model S P100DL Electric GT race car track-tested by Top Gear veteran
British racing driver and former Top Gear and Fifth Gear television presenter Tiff Needell recently got behind the wheel of the Electric GT’s Tesla Model S P100DL race car. In a video uploaded on YouTube’s LoveCars channel, the former race driver provided several compelling insights about the vehicle, including its handling, its speed, as well as its areas for improvement.
The Electric GT, officially called the Electric Production Car Series, is a zero-emission racing series featuring modified Tesla Model S P100D vehicles. The Electric GT’s inaugural season is scheduled to begin at Jerez on November 4, 2018, ending on October 13, 2019 at Algarve. Ten races are planned for the upcoming racing season.
Tiff’s test drive of the Electric GT’s P100DL race car was held at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, a track famed for hosting the Spanish Grand Prix and the MotoGP. The track, which is 2.892 miles long, features 16 turns including an iconic straight stretch where vehicles can achieve top speed. According to the veteran race driver, the Model S P100D featured impeccable handling and aerodynamics that simply allowed the vehicle to stick to the road despite him performing aggressive driving maneuvers.
As noted by auto journalist Bozi Tatarevic on Twitter, several scenes of Tiff’s Electric GT test drive video revealed interesting details about the modified electric car. Apart from stripping the car of its interior and fitting a widebody kit made of flax fiber composite to reduce the vehicle’s weight by 1100 pounds, several aspects of the race-ready Electric GT Model S P100D stood out. As noted by Tatarevic, the Tesla race car’s door handles are permanently out, which likely helped save weight on the vehicle. An error displayed on the driver’s console pertaining to the electric car’s Air Suspension also suggests that the vehicle is equipped with an aftermarket coilover setup.
The Model S P100D’s performance brakes were further replaced with larger Alcon brakes. As noted by Tatarevic in his observations on Twitter, the rotor hat on the Electric GT race car’s brakes combines a wheel spacer. The hood of the vehicle is canted as well, likely to aid the electric car’s cooling systems. Brief shots of the vehicle under the hood seemingly reveal that Electric GT might have also modified or replaced the brake master cylinder for the vehicle. Inside the cockpit, a racing ECU could be seen installed beside the P100D race car’s media control unit.
As impressive as the Electric GT Model S P100D was on the track, however, Tiff Needell ultimately noted that the vehicle’s battery still showed some heating issues, as revealed by the Model S’ systems throttling performance after 1.5 hot laps around the Barcelona track and fans being directed towards the vehicle’s battery pack after run. The veteran racing driver stated, however, that if Electric GT can find a workaround with the Model S’ battery heating issues, the racing series could very well be successful.
While the Electric GT has chosen the Model S P100D as its vehicle of choice for its inaugural season later this year, another Tesla vehicle is steadily gaining reputation on the track. Just recently, a non-Performance Long Range Model RWD Model 3 with aftermarket suspension and brakes won the Canadian Sport Compact Series Time Attack series, defeating a Porsche Boxer and a Mazda RX-8 to claim the title. During the entire event, Sasha Anis, the driver of the vehicle, noted that the Model 3 did not experience any heating problems at all. The Model 3 Performance, which Elon Musk stated would be 15% faster than a BMW M3 around the track, is expected to perform even better during spirited driving.
Watch Tiff Needell’s test drive of the Electric GT Model S P100DL in the video below.
Elon Musk
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
SpaceX has secured an option to acquire Cursor AI for $60 billion ahead of its historic IPO.
SpaceX announced today it has struck a deal with AI coding startup Cursor, securing the option to acquire the company outright for $60 billion later this year, while committing $10 billion for joint development work in the interim. The announcement described the partnership as building “the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI,” and comes just days after Cursor was separately reported to be raising $2 billion at a valuation above $50 billion.
The move makes strategic sense given where each company currently stands. Cursor currently pays retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI to the same companies competing directly against it with Claude Code and Codex. That means every dollar of revenue Cursor earns partially funds its own competition. With SpaceX bringing computational infrastructure to the Cursor platform, that could reduce Cursor’s dependence on OpenAI and Anthropic’s Claude AI as its providers. Access to SpaceX’s Colossus supercomputer, with compute equivalent to one million Nvidia H100 chips, gives Cursor the infrastructure to run and train its own models at a scale it could never afford independently. That one change restructures the entire unit economics of the business.
Elon Musk teases crazy outlook for xAI against its competitors
Cursor’s $2 billion in annualized revenue and enterprise reach across more than half of Fortune 500 companies gives SpaceX something its xAI subsidiary currently lacks, which is a proven, fast-growing software business with real enterprise distribution.
For Cursor, SpaceX’s $10 billion in joint development funding is transformational. Cursor raised $3.3 billion across all of 2025 to reach that $2 billion in revenue. A single $10 billion commitment from SpaceX, even as a development payment rather than an acquisition, dwarfs everything Cursor has raised in its entire existence. That capital accelerates product development, enterprise sales infrastructure, and proprietary model training simultaneously.
The timing is deliberate. SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC on April 1, 2026, targeting a June listing at a $1.75 trillion valuation, in what would be the largest public offering in history. The company is expected to begin its roadshow the week of June 8, with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley serving as underwriters. Adding Cursor to the portfolio before that roadshow gives IPO investors a concrete enterprise software revenue story to price in, alongside rockets and satellite internet.
The deal also addresses a weakness that became visible after February’s xAI merger. Several xAI co-founders departed following that acquisition, and SpaceX had already hired two Cursor engineers, signaling where its AI talent strategy was heading. Cursor, for its part, faces a pricing disadvantage competing against Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Whether SpaceX exercises the full acquisition option before its IPO or after remains the open question. Either way, this deal reshapes what investors will be buying into when SpaceX goes public.
Elon Musk
Tesla is sending its humanoid Optimus robot to the Boston Marathon
Tesla’s Optimus robot is heading to the Boston Marathon finish line
Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot will be stationed at the Tesla showroom at 888 Boylston Street in Boston, right along the final stretch of the Boston Marathon today, ready to cheer on runners and pose for photos with spectators.
According to a Tesla email shared by content creator Sawyer Merritt on X, Optimus will be at the Boston Boylston Street showroom on April 20, coinciding with Marathon Monday weekend. The Boston Marathon finishes on Boylston Street, and the surrounding area draws hundreds of thousands of spectators along with international broadcast coverage. Placing Optimus there puts it in front of a massive public audience at zero advertising cost.
Just got this email. @Tesla’s Optimus robot is coming to Boston.
“Join us from April 19 to 20, 2026, at Tesla Boston Boylston Street showroom to meet Optimus, our humanoid robot, for Marathon Monday. Optimus will be cheering with you on the sidelines and posing for photos.” pic.twitter.com/chxoooO2xV
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) April 18, 2026
The Tesla showroom is at 888 Boylston Street, between Gloucester Street and Fairfield Street. The final mile of the marathon runs directly along Boylston Street, with runners passing the big stores before reaching the finish line at Copley Square.
Optimus was first announced at Tesla’s AI Day event on August 19, 2021, when Elon Musk presented a vision for a general-purpose robot designed to take on dangerous, repetitive, and unwanted tasks. In March 2026, Optimus appeared at the Appliance and Electronics World Expo in Shanghai, where on-site staff stated that mass production of the robot could begin by the end of 2026. Before that, it showed up at the Tesla Hollywood Diner opening in July 2025 and at a Miami showroom event in December 2025.
Tesla’s well-calculated display of Optimus gives the public a low-pressure first encounter with a robot that Tesla is preparing to soon deploy at scale. The company has previously indicated plans to manufacture Optimus robots at its Fremont facility at up to 1 million units annually, with an Optimus production line at Gigafactory Texas targeting 10 million units per year.
Tesla showcases Optimus humanoid robot at AWE 2026 in Shanghai
Musk has said that Optimus “has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time,” and separately that roughly 80 percent of Tesla’s future value will come from the robot program. Whether that holds depends on production execution. For now, Boston gets a preview of what that future looks like, standing at the finish line on Boylston Street while 32,000 runners pass by.
Elon Musk
Tesla’s golden era is no longer a tagline
Tesla “golden era” teaser video highlights the future of transportation and why car ownership itself may be the next thing to change.
The golden age of autonomous ridesharing is arriving, and Tesla is making sure we can all picture a future that looks like the future. A recent teaser posted to X shows a Cybercab parked outside a home, and with a clear message that your everyday life may soon look like this when the driverless vehicles shows up at your door.
Tesla has begun the rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the production of its dedicated, fully-autonomous Cybercab vehicle. The first Cybercab rolled off the Giga Texas assembly line on February 17, 2026, with volume production now targeted for this month. Additionally, the Robotaxi service built around it is already running, without human drivers, in US cities.
Tesla Cybercab production ignites with 60 units spotted at Giga Texas
The Cybercab is built without a steering wheel, pedals, or side mirrors, designed from the ground up for unsupervised autonomous operation. Musk described the manufacturing approach as closer to consumer electronics than traditional car production, targeting a cycle time of one unit every ten seconds at full scale.
Drone footage from April 13, 2026 captured over 50 Cybercab units on the Giga Texas campus, with several clustered near the crash testing facility. Musk has noted that Tesla plans to sell the Cybercab to consumers for under $30,000, and owners will be able to add their vehicles to the Tesla robotaxi network when not in personal use, potentially generating income to offset the vehicle’s purchase cost. That model changes the math on vehicle ownership in a meaningful way, making a car something closer to a depreciating asset that can also earn by paying itself off and generate a profit.
During Tesla’s Q4 earnings call, the company confirmed plans to expand the Robotaxi program to seven new cities in the first half of 2026, including Dallas, Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and Las Vegas. The service already runs without safety drivers in Austin, and public road testing of the Cybercab has expanded to five states, including California, Texas, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts.
Golden era pic.twitter.com/AS6pX2dK8N
— Tesla Robotaxi (@robotaxi) April 16, 2026
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