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Tesla Model Y becomes a hotel amenity thanks to ride-sharing platform Envoy

Credit: Tesla

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Update 2:45 PM ET 4/20/2022: Paragraph 3 updated with CEO comments.

Envoy Technologies has made the Tesla Model Y an official amenity for visitors of the Mondrian South Beach hotel in Miami. The ride-sharing platform announced this morning that it has entered the hospitality market by making the Model Y available to hotel guests without the hassle and expense of traditional rental services.

For the first time, Envoy is launching at a hotel, previously building its EV share offering in multifamily housing communities and office buildings. Public car share options continue to decline, and rental options become more expensive and less available, leaving travelers with few options that are both affordable and convenient. Envoy cuts through these two shortcomings, making on-site EV sharing options a property amenity, it said.

Credit: Envoy

“The mission of Envoy is to provide EV access and education to people where they live, work and stay. Our goal is to meet our members at their doorstep including where they travel, like guests staying at the Mondrian. Powered by our smart e-mobility travel becomes more convenient and it creates a network effect helping to make our world a cleaner place,” Ori Sagie, CEO and co-founder of Envoy Technologies, said.

“We are thrilled with the launch of our first electric car share at a luxury hotel, the Mondrian South Beach,” Aric Ohana, President and Co-Founder of Envoy, said. “This is our first entry into the hospitality market and, as a busy traveler myself, I know first hand how hard it can be to find reliable transportation in a new city.”

The first Model Y will be available at the Mondrian South Beach in Miami, Florida. Visitors at the Mondrian luxury hotel will be able to book the Model Y through the Envoy Mobility app, giving them easy access to an electric vehicle without hefty fees.

“Mondrian South Beach is delighted to be the first hotel to offer Envoy, electric car sharing. Our guests will appreciate the ease of dedicated, immediate transportation right out of the lobby,” Director of Marketing for the Mondrian South Beach, Christina Gil, said. “The versatile Tesla Model Y crossover will offer plenty of space for guest parties to zip around Miami in comfort with all the innovative tech bells and whistles.”

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Rental companies have also ventured into the market of electric vehicles recently. Hertz purchased Model 3 and Model Y units from Tesla last year and added vehicles from Polestar this year. As sustainable options for passenger transportation become more popular around the country, car rental companies are continuing to expand their lineup of electric options to align with customer needs.

Envoy has deployed over 300 EVs at more than 150 multifamily properties and offices since its inception in 2017. It has also installed more than 150 charging stations for vehicles. Envoy is available across the U.S. including FloridaCaliforniaOregonWashingtonNew York, and Illinois.

I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.

Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

Tesla is fixing Full Self-Driving’s pothole problem

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Tesla Model Y L in a field
Credit: Tesla

Tesla Full Self-Driving is set to get a major fix with pothole avoidance, a feature that CEO Elon Musk said recently was “coming soon.” The feature has been included within the FSD v14 release notes for some time as an upcoming improvement.

Potholes come in all shapes and sizes, but one thing is universal about them, and that is the fact that every driver wants to avoid them. Driving into or over a pothole can cause tire and wheel damage, alignment issues, and even, in some more severe instances, injury to occupants or major damage to a vehicle in despair.

Tesla Cybercab uses a unique strategy for picking up the right rider

Musk said late last night in a post that pothole avoidance while utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite is “coming soon.”

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Full Self-Driving, even in its most recent and robust forms, still has its shortcomings. While the suite has performed exceptionally well with avoiding on-road obstacles like cardboard boxes, horse droppings, car parts, and other debris, it still seems to struggle with recognizing certain things.

Potholes and other abrupt changes in a road’s layout are things that FSD still tends to struggle with. Perhaps the suite’s 3D modeling is still in need of some additional data or some sort of script that will help it to avoid a potentially destructive pothole or bump in the road that would be easily recognizable by the human eye.

Musk has mentioned pothole avoidance for some time, with the initial idea coming in April 2019 when an owner first requested the feature. Musk said that Tesla would “definitely” develop pothole avoidance.

In August 2020, Musk said Tesla was in the process of labeling bumps and potholes so cars can either slow down or steer around them altogether.

Tesla to utilize micro maps for pothole-detection in future update

Avoiding major disturbances in the road is a necessary feature for Full Self-Driving to have, especially as Tesla is working toward a fully autonomous program that will eventually allow every occupant in the vehicle to sleep, work, or enjoy leisure time while traveling.

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That truly begins this week with the launch of Cybercab on Thursday.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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Elon Musk

OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership

OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.

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OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.

In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.

That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.

Elon Musk breaks silence on OpenAI trial decision

SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.

Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.

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Elon Musk admits he was ‘clearly wrong’ about Anthropic

Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.

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