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Tesla Model S Plaid Pikes Peak racecar hits 136 mph in practice run at 14k feet

Credit: Unplugged Performance/Twitter

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5 years ago

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There are very few times where one can justify traveling 136 mph while driving on a mountain at 14,000 feet. Legendary racecar driver Randy Pobst’s recent test run at the upper section of Pikes Peak using his Unplugged Model S Plaid was certainly one of them. And as could be seen in a video of his run, the Model S Plaid is truly a remarkable, frighteningly fast machine. 

Tesla aftermarket parts maker and tuning house Unplugged Performance has returned to Pikes Peak, this time with a monstrously powerful Model S Plaid racecar. Last year, the company, together with racer Randy Pobst, tried to tackle the mountain in a modified Model 3 Performance. However, misfortune struck on the second day of practice, which forced the team to rebuild the vehicle in just a couple of days. 

The team made it to race day with a rebuilt Model 3 Performance racer, but thermal issues with the battery resulted in the vehicle throttling its power and only getting second place at the Exhibition Class. Pobst and Unplugged Performance vowed to return. 

And return they did, taking Tesla’s most formidable electric car to date with them. Initial tests of the Model S Plaid at Laguna Seca Raceway showed that the vehicle was capable of overtaking hypercars like the McLaren Senna around the track. This hinted that the Unplugged Team and Randy Pobst might have a solid chance of finishing well in this year’s Pikes Peak Hill Climb. 

The Tesla tuning house shared a video of Pobst’s test at the upper section of Pikes Peak, and it is downright insane. Over the course of the video, the Model S Plaid could be seen accelerating out of corners at almost alien speed, at one point even hitting 136 mph. This is incredibly remarkable as the upper stage of Pikes Peak is at 14,000 feet, and some sections are especially nail-biting due to the absence of guard rails. 

Yet during the course of the test run, Pobst pushed his Model S Plaid racecar towards the summit, and at one point, the legendary driver could be heard loudly exclaiming that the car was really fast. Such a comment is no joke, especially considering that it came from one of the fastest men in the world, and one who has driven the world’s best automobiles. 

Armed with a car that’s practically built with alien technology, Randy Pobst and Unplugged Performance’s return to Pikes Peak this year is shaping up to be one amazing comeback story. 

Watch the Tesla Model S Plaid rip through Pikes Peak’s upper section in the video below. 

Do you have anything to share with the Teslarati Team? We’d love to hear from you, email us at tips@teslarati.com.

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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Lifestyle

Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

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24 hours ago

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August 13, 2026

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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

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Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

4 days ago

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August 10, 2026

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Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

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Elon Musk

The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it

The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.

Published

6 days ago

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August 7, 2026

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The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.

The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.

The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.

The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.

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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.

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