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Tesla Model S beats 70 years of motoring legends to win MotorTrend’s Ultimate Car of the Year award
After seven years in the market, multiple awards, and establishing itself as the undisputed king of premium electric sedans, the Tesla Model S has earned what could very well be its most impressive award to date. Just recently, the Model S, the first vehicle designed from the ground up by Tesla, was dubbed by MotorTrend as its Ultimate Car of the Year, beating 70 years worth of motoring legends in the process.
MotorTrend started its Car of the Year awards in 1949, which was won by Cadillac. Over the years, the publication’s Car of the Year award would expand to several segments such as Imports, Trucks, and SUVs. Despite this, each winner of the esteemed award had one thing in common: each vehicle scored very well under the publication’s six criteria — Advancement in Design, Engineering Excellence, Efficiency, Performance of Intended Function, Value, and Safety.
With MotorTrend celebrating its 70th anniversary, the publication opted to do something special this year. Ninety-two vehicles have received the Car of the Year award to date, but as mentioned by the publication in an announcement, one of these 92 vehicles is more significant than the others. From this 92, eight finalists were selected, corresponding to every decade that the publication has been active. These vehicles are the 1949 Cadillac lineup, the 1955 Chevrolet lineup, the 1968 Pontiac GTO, the 1972 Citroën SM, the 1986 Mazda RX-7, the 1996 Dodge Caravan, the 2004 Toyota Prius, and the 2013 Tesla Model S.
While the 2010-2020 decade is not over yet, it is difficult to argue that the most essential car of recent years is the Tesla Model S. Created as a successor to the original Tesla Roadster and designed to prove that all-electric cars can be viable (and even superior) alternatives to gas and diesel-powered sedans, the Model S was a groundbreaking vehicle from the inside out. The sedan’s production ramp experienced some delays considering Tesla’s inexperience (the company had only been producing the low-volume Roadsters when the Model S came out), but when it did, it shook the auto industry to its core.
MotorTrend calls the Model S as a “rolling manifesto,” a car that personifies CEO Elon Musk’s view of electric vehicles as tomorrow’s form of transportation. Even before its insanely quick configurations were released, the original Model S proved enough to disrupt the luxury sedan segment. Thanks to its rear-mounted electric motor, it was quick off the line, hitting 0-60 mph in 4.0 seconds, it seated seven (two in jump seats), and it was also incredibly efficient. What’s more, it had 265 miles of range per charge, showing the auto industry that electric cars can go the distance too, literally. These, together with the vehicle’s never-before-seen tech, ultimately helped the Model S become MotorTrend’s 2013 Car of the Year.
The Model S is more than a great electric car. Rather, it is an excellent vehicle that just happens to be electric. Bold and progressive, Tesla’s flagship sedan still stands as the gold standard that competing EVs today are still benchmarked against. Constantly evolving thanks to free, over-the-air updates from Tesla, the Model S also stands as one of the only vehicles released this decade that actually becomes better with age. For MotorTrend, these characteristics make the Model S deserving of the Ultimate Car of the Year award, perhaps even more.
“No vehicle we’ve awarded, be it Car of the Year, Import Car of the Year, SUV of the Year, or Truck of the Year, can equal the impact, performance, and engineering excellence that is our Ultimate Car of the Year winner, the 2013 Tesla Model S,” the publication wrote.
MotorTrend’s feature on the Tesla Model S as a finalist in its Ultimate Car of the Year awards could be accessed here. The final results of the awards could be accessed here.
The Tesla Model S’ Ultimate Car of the Year award comes just a day after its smaller sibling, the Model 3, was deemed as the 2019 Car of the Year and 2019 Premium Electric Car of the Year by AutoExpress UK. Just like its larger sibling, the Model 3 was granted the accolade for its perfect blend of technology and driving dynamics, making the car that a likely disruptor in the auto industry, but in a much bigger scale.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s xAI bets $20B on Mississippi with 2GW AI data center project
The project is expected to create hundreds of permanent jobs, dramatically expand xAI’s computing capacity, and further cement the Mid-South as a growing hub for AI infrastructure.
Elon Musk’s xAI plans to pour more than $20 billion into a massive new data center campus in Southaven, Mississippi, marking the largest single economic development project in the state’s history.
The project is expected to create hundreds of permanent jobs, dramatically expand xAI’s computing capacity, and further cement the Mid-South as a growing hub for AI infrastructure.
xAI goes MACROHARDRR in Mississippi
xAI has acquired and is retrofitting an existing facility in Southaven to serve as a new data center, which will be known as “MACROHARDRR.” The site sits near a recently acquired power plant and close to one of xAI’s existing data centers in Tennessee, creating a regional cluster designed to support large-scale AI training and inference.
Once completed, the Southaven facility is expected to push the company’s total computing capacity to nearly 2 GW, placing it among the most powerful AI compute installations globally. The data center is scheduled to begin operations in February 2026.
Gov. Tate Reeves shared his optimism about the project in a press release. “This record-shattering $20 billion investment is an amazing start to what is sure to be another incredible year for economic development in Mississippi. Today, Elon Musk is bringing xAI to DeSoto County, a project that will transform the region and bring amazing opportunities to its residents for generations. This is the largest economic development project in Mississippi’s history,” he said.
xAI’s broader AI ambitions
To secure the investment, the Mississippi Development Authority approved xAI for its Data Center Incentive program, which provides sales and use tax exemptions on eligible computing hardware and software. The City of Southaven and DeSoto County are also supporting the project through fee-in-lieu agreements aimed at accelerating development timelines and reducing upfront costs.
Founded in 2023 by Elon Musk, xAI develops advanced artificial intelligence systems focused on large-scale reasoning and generative applications. Its flagship product, Grok, is integrated with the social media platform X, alongside a growing suite of APIs for image generation, voice, and autonomous agents, including offerings tailored for government use.
Elon Musk highlighted xAi’s growth and momentum in a comment about the matter. “xAI is scaling at an immeasurable pace — we are building our third massive data center in the greater Memphis area. MACROHARDRR pushes our Colossus training compute to ~2GW – by far the most powerful AI system on Earth. This is insane execution speed by xAI and the state of Mississippi. We are grateful to Governor Reeves for his support of building xAI at warp speed,” Musk said.
Tesla’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, says that something that was expected with version 14.3 of the company’s Full Self-Driving platform has already partially shipped with the current build of version 14.2.
Tesla and CEO Elon Musk have teased on several occasions that reasoning will be a big piece of future Full Self-Driving builds, helping bring forth the “sentient” narrative that the company has pushed for these more advanced FSD versions.
Back in October on the Q3 Earnings Call, Musk said:
“With reasoning, it’s literally going to think about which parking spot to pick. It’ll drop you off at the entrance of the store, then go find a parking spot. It’s going to spot empty spots much better than a human. It’s going to use reasoning to solve things.”
Musk said in the same month:
“By v14.3, your car will feel like it is sentient.”
Amazingly, Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.2.2.2, which is the most recent iteration released, is very close to this sentient feeling. However, there are more things that need to be improved, and logic appears to be in the future plans to help with decision-making in general, alongside other refinements and features.
On Thursday evening, Elluswamy revealed that some of the reasoning features have already been rolled out, confirming that it has been added to navigation route changes during construction, as well as with parking options.
He added that “more and more reasoning will ship in Q1.”
🚨 Tesla’s Ashok Elluswamy reveals Nav decisions when encountering construction and parking options contain “some elements of reasoning”
More uses of reasoning will be shipped later this quarter, a big tidbit of info as we wait v14.3 https://t.co/jty8llgsKM
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) January 9, 2026
Interestingly, parking improvements were hinted at being added in the initial rollout of v14.2 several months ago. These had not rolled out to vehicles quite yet, as they were listed under the future improvements portion of the release notes, but it appears things have already started to make their way to cars in a limited fashion.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.2 – Full Review, the Good and the Bad
As reasoning is more involved in more of the Full Self-Driving suite, it is likely we will see cars make better decisions in terms of routing and navigation, which is a big complaint of many owners (including me).
Additionally, the operation as a whole should be smoother and more comfortable to owners, which is hard to believe considering how good it is already. Nevertheless, there are absolutely improvements that need to be made before Tesla can introduce completely unsupervised FSD.
Elon Musk
Tesla’s Elon Musk: 10 billion miles needed for safe Unsupervised FSD
As per the CEO, roughly 10 billion miles of training data are required due to reality’s “super long tail of complexity.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has provided an updated estimate for the training data needed to achieve truly safe unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD).
As per the CEO, roughly 10 billion miles of training data are required due to reality’s “super long tail of complexity.”
10 billion miles of training data
Musk comment came as a reply to Apple and Rivian alum Paul Beisel, who posted an analysis on X about the gap between tech demonstrations and real-world products. In his post, Beisel highlighted Tesla’s data-driven lead in autonomy, and he also argued that it would not be easy for rivals to become a legitimate competitor to FSD quickly.
“The notion that someone can ‘catch up’ to this problem primarily through simulation and limited on-road exposure strikes me as deeply naive. This is not a demo problem. It is a scale, data, and iteration problem— and Tesla is already far, far down that road while others are just getting started,” Beisel wrote.
Musk responded to Beisel’s post, stating that “Roughly 10 billion miles of training data is needed to achieve safe unsupervised self-driving. Reality has a super long tail of complexity.” This is quite interesting considering that in his Master Plan Part Deux, Elon Musk estimated that worldwide regulatory approval for autonomous driving would require around 6 billion miles.
FSD’s total training miles
As 2025 came to a close, Tesla community members observed that FSD was already nearing 7 billion miles driven, with over 2.5 billion miles being from inner city roads. The 7-billion-mile mark was passed just a few days later. This suggests that Tesla is likely the company today with the most training data for its autonomous driving program.
The difficulties of achieving autonomy were referenced by Elon Musk recently, when he commented on Nvidia’s Alpamayo program. As per Musk, “they will find that it’s easy to get to 99% and then super hard to solve the long tail of the distribution.” These sentiments were echoed by Tesla VP for AI software Ashok Elluswamy, who also noted on X that “the long tail is sooo long, that most people can’t grasp it.”
Elon Musk’s xAI bets $20B on Mississippi with 2GW AI data center project
Tesla AI Head says future FSD feature has already partially shipped
