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[UPDATE] Tesla Model S Struck By Lightning While Charging
A Model S disabled by lightning while charging must wait at least one day for Tesla technicians to figure out what went wrong and restore it to service.
UPDATED June 6
It’s been a week since Sarah Day’s Model S got struck by lightning while she was at a SuperCharger facility. So far, she reports Tesla really has no idea what happened to her car, but the technicians at the local Tesla Service Center have been kept busy trying to repair it.
She understands the battery has been removed and sent off to the factory in California, where Tesla engineers “are almost giddy to get their hands on it,” she says. Apparently this is a first of its kind event and the company is putting every effort into trying to understand what happened. Sarah has been told that there may be an official announcement from Tesla when they get it all figured out.
In the meantime, she says “All eyes are on Columbus.” The incident occurred in Ohio, not Georgia as I originally thought. She has asked to be provided with a full technical analysis of what happened to her car and what it will take to fix it when that information becomes available.
For now, there seems to be no correlation between the lightning strike and the fact that her car was charging at the time. It seems Sarah was just unlucky that the lightning came so close. It may be cool to be the center of attention at Tesla headquarters for a little while, but I think by now she would prefer to have her car back so she can get on with her life.
Original post
A Model S struck by lightning while charging will have to wait at least one day for Tesla technicians to bring it back to life and figure out what happened. Sarah Day was charging her Tesla Model S at a Supercharger location near Columbus, Georgia [Edit: The location of the event occurred at Columbus, OH and not Columbus, GA as originally published] on Sunday morning when a lightning bolt hit very close by. Her first indication that something was wrong came when her BlackVue dash cam lost power. Here’s how she describes what happened next:
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“I heard the crash, and just a second or two after about 9 errors popped up on the dashboard. Some of them were low charge warnings, saying it would disable some functions. Others were on how the car needs to be serviced. I was also getting that the car can’t be charged, and that the 12 volt battery is low.
“After the storm died down I got out of the car. The charging port wasn’t lit up, and when I tried to remove the cable it wouldn’t come out. I still had most of the functions in the car, including the touchscreen. The other car that was charging just a couple stalls down from me was completely fine and drove away, though I didn’t get to talk to that owner afterwards.”
Sarah called Tesla but had trouble getting through due to high call volume. The company agreed to send a tow truck, but before it got there, the 12 volt battery failed and the touchscreen shut down. When the tow driver arrived, he attempted to charge up the battery but it took two attempts before the touchscreen came back to life. Even then, the charging cable still would not disconnect from the car. Sarah couldn’t get the sunroof to close, either.
Since the car couldn’t be towed with the charging cable connected, Sarah had to leave her car at the Supercharger station with the sunroof partially open. There was nothing more she could do until the local Tesla service station opened for business on Monday morning.
Although Sarah wasn’t happy about her car being disabled, she can’t say enough good things about Tesla service and support people who took her phone calls.
“Tesla customer service was amazing. They were very responsive, and offered to rent me a car from enterprise so I could come home. I said I would rather stay with the car for a couple days to see how it all played out. I am from Atlanta and I was visiting a friend in Columbus, and I didn’t want to be that far away from the car in case of any issues.
“They offered to put me up in a hotel for a night, and also to get me a taxi or Uber ride. I decided I’d just stay with my friend, but they sent the Uber driver over for me. Also, the service center in Marietta, GA has been in contact with me to see how things are going. I know them pretty well, as well as one of the technicians. They have been incredibly helpful and supportive, though they can’t really do anything from there.”
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The local Tesla service center will send a technician Monday morning to get the charging cable disconnected and bring the car in to be checked over. Sarah was told that each Supercharger has multiple relays and sensors to protect the cars from surges. At this point, she has no explanation for why her car was disabled, but expects a full report on Monday. She has complete confidence in Tesla service personal to identify the problem and get her car functioning properly again.
“They usually are pretty thorough with their descriptions of what went wrong. I’m hoping that it’s something simple. The technician in Marietta says the car may have sensed the large external voltage spike and disconnected everything as a safety precaution, but I don’t know if that would cause the charging port to malfunction.”
Thanks to Sarah Day for sharing with us details of her experience while she was in the middle of being stranded far from home. We will update this report when more information becomes available.
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.
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.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
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.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
