Elon Musk
I took a Tesla Model Y weekend-long Demo Drive – Here’s what I learned
I had a weekend with the new Tesla Model Y, and it truly solidified that EVs are the future, if we didn’t know that already.
Tesla offered me a weekend-long Demo Drive in the new Model Y, a new program the company is offering to people as a way to taste what it is like to own an EV. For me, it was a great look into owning an EV while renting a townhouse without charging infrastructure, but it gave me a lot more insight as well.
A Sales Advisor at a local showroom texted me several weeks back to see if I would want to take the new Model Y from the showroom to my house for a weekend. I immediately said yes, scheduled a weekend when family and friends would be nearby to experience things like Full Self-Driving, and booked it.
I picked it up on Saturday at 6 p.m. as the showroom closed, and I was on my way back home within ten minutes.
First Things First
My first order of business was getting some Full Self-Driving demos in, taking my Fiancè for a hands-free — but supervised — journey first. It was not her first time experiencing FSD, as we had taken a Demo Drive a few months back and experienced Hardware 3 and the past iteration of the Model Y.
However, we only used FSD for about ten minutes while checking out a Model Y to buy back in February.
The next morning, we picked my parents up for breakfast and took them on their first-ever FSD experience. They live in a rural part of my hometown in Southern Pennsylvania, where there are no lines on the road, potholes everywhere, deer constantly crossing the road, and sharp turns that can be dangerous during the daytime, as you cannot see oncoming headlights.
🚨 First order of business: Took my parents on an FSD journey.
“Wow!”
“This is crazy!”
You could hear the skepticism in my Dad’s voice as I started the drive. By the end of it, he couldn’t believe how it navigated non-lined backroads to his house! https://t.co/qisRxDlY5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 4, 2025
It was really something to see how my Dad changed his belief on FSD in the matter of just a few minutes. The night before, I took my Mom and Step Dad on a drive, and they felt the same way. My Dad is just more vocal about his skepticism, so I was happy to hear the reversal of his perspective.
Living without Charging and How It Changed My Mindset
One of the biggest things that kept me from buying the Model Y we looked at in February was the lack of charging in my neighborhood. I do not get to park directly in front of my front door, and my neighborhood is still considering some minor infrastructure for residents.
With the Long Range All-Wheel-Drive version of the new Model Y, Tesla boasts a range of 327 miles. We picked it up from the Showroom at 98 percent state-of-charge.
We ran our usual errands, went out to dinner, drove around for leisure to enjoy the car, and after all that, we still returned the car with 40 percent left. This truly eliminated any concerns I would have about charging at home, at least in the near term.
Realistically, I would like to have charging at home. The experience made me realize I would probably be driving to a Supercharger once a week to get range, which is about as frequent as I visit a gas pump now. It would not be a tremendous change, and it made me realize that when I do eventually make the jump, if I am still living in our townhome that we rent, I would get through it without any real issues.
Take my words as a bit of advice: If you’re overly concerned about not having charging at your apartment or home, don’t stress too much about it.
The Good and Bad with Full Self-Driving
Overall, our Full Self-Driving experience was incredibly valuable. My plan was to drive the car manually most of the time, but I truly only did that for roughly 5 percent of the miles we traveled together.
I planned for a big stress test on Sunday evening, and that’s what we did. We had to run out and get some things for a wedding we’re attending this coming weekend, and it required us to travel all over York from the East end to the West end, much of which was spent traveling on the Lincoln Highway. In West York, this stretch of highway is incredibly dysfunctional, busy, and is one of the drives I rue the most in the area.
Full Self-Driving made it very easy, as I just set the destination on several occasions and let the car do all the work.
Our first drive took us from our house to our local Target. It did everything flawlessly. I took over once we got into the parking lot just to find a parking space on my own:
🚨 Tesla Full Self-Driving takes my Fiancé and I to Target
Flawless drive! We’ll document the rest of our errands today! pic.twitter.com/TAx3mWmVgh
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 4, 2025
I didn’t record the trip from Target to the Burlington Coat Factory, just a mile away, but I did record the next leg of the trip, which was from Burlington in East York to Burlington in West York. This was when I had my first complaint with FSD, and it dealt with the operation in parking lots.
You’ll see at the beginning of this video that there was an instance where the car waited for one cross-traffic warning to stop before proceeding, but ignored another cross-traffic warning from the other direction. The car pulled out on this person, you’ll see me wave to apologize, then I take control of the car, as it was too close to that other car for my liking. This was the only issue we experienced on this drive:
🚨 On this drive, FSD pulled out of this spot while there was a car approaching from our right (you’ll see the Red cross-traffic warning on the screen)
It also approached that vehicle a little too close for my liking, so to be safe I took over.
A great drive across town… pic.twitter.com/ANuZ4QcZB6
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 4, 2025
I found that parking lots were a weak point of FSD. It is not that I did not feel confident in its abilities to make it through these lots safely, but it reminded me a lot of what I think a 16-year-old who just got their license would drive through a busy parking area: hesitant, not confident, tentative.
Several of our X followers said the same thing:
This is such a problem… To the point I don’t even use start FSD from Park anymore
— ProjectRCC (@Project_RCC) May 5, 2025
Parking lots are little bit of a weakness. But I believe this will be solved in the next update we get 💯
— Overly Optimistic Future (@OOpFuture) May 4, 2025
Leaving the West York Burlington and heading to a Walgreens to pick up some pictures we had printed was the next leg of our journey. This was where we got to test a difficult off-ramp on I-83 south and Autopark in the Walgreens parking lot.
The off-ramp for the Market Street exit and the on-ramp use the same lane, so merging traffic can be a bit of a nightmare for those trying to get off of the highway, which is what we were trying to do. FSD managed it cleanly, as several cars were merging onto I-83, the car found a soft spot in the traffic and got off without any issue. This impressed me because I know it can be stressful at times, especially during rush hour.
Autopark worked well and backed into a spot with no issues:
🚨 The final leg of our trip here: FSD did a great job of navigating through this parking lot and getting us onto a highway with a very short on-ramp (a very typical part of living and driving in Pennsylvania).
Also, Autopark did a great job! I would like to see it improve by… pic.twitter.com/OBefKZKDCo
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 5, 2025
Our final trip with FSD was from our home to the showroom. This would be our longest single-trip using FSD, and it was the most impressive yet.
The first thing it was tasked with was merging onto the highway with a very short lane to do so. FSD recognized this, saw an oncoming car that did not get over into the passing lane to make space (despite it having the room to do so as a courtesy), and sped up to take the slot it was given. It overtook slower cars, stayed in the right lane near on-ramps to make merging for others easier, and got us through the Harrisburg split with no issues.
As we turned onto the Carlisle Pike, the right lane was closed about a quarter-mile after we merged onto it. We had a vehicle beside us that did not want to let us over, so FSD waited, allowed the car to pass, and quickly took the three-car-length gap, safely getting on. This was a funny one because I noticed my Fiancè’s hand grab the handle on her door as a reactionary response.
She realized after it was unnecessary, and it did a better job than many people we know would have done:
🚨 The new Tesla Model Y drove my Fiancé and me back to the Tesla Showroom today to part ways 🥺
It was awesome to have an entire weekend with this awesome car. This 45-minute drive is condensed to just 36 seconds.
One portion of this drive included an impressive merge into a… pic.twitter.com/TjCXcpRUXG
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 5, 2025
This finished our experience with the Model Y for the weekend, and it was hard to say goodbye.
Conclusion
It seems that a trade-in will be happening in the coming months. My biggest reservation was residential charging, and I learned it really was not something I needed to be overly concerned about.
Full Self-Driving was truly the big thing that sold me on this car. The new Model Y is obviously a great vehicle to begin with, but FSD was the number one thing that I will miss because it made driving such a breeze.
More novelty things I will miss are being able to watch YouTube while I wait in the car, and pranking people with the Fart on Contact/Sit Happens feature, something that gave us all a good laugh.
It was a great weekend with the new Model Y! In the coming months, I hope to get my hands on another vehicle for a weekend.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”
This is the future we shall bring into being pic.twitter.com/8aD0w8MDVc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026
The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.
This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.
What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.
That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
Elon Musk teased a glowing new Boring Company merch idea, complete with a Geiger counter.
Elon Musk teased the next piece of Boring Company merchandise on X Saturday, and it is exactly as unserious as fans of the company’s product history have come to expect. “The next @boringcompany merch will put Uranium in Uranus,” Musk wrote in a thread posted early Saturday morning. He followed up by explaining that the item would glow in the dark, “because otherwise how could you find it,” and that a Geiger counter would be sold separately as “an optional strap-on.”
Musk closed the thread with a line that doubles as a mission statement for the tunneling company’s merchandise arm: “It’s not easy coming up with something that is both outrageously unsellable and yet extremely popular.”
The Boring Company has built a small but consistent side business out of novelty items that start as jokes and end up selling out. The company’s Not-a-Flamethrower raised roughly $10 million in a few days back in 2018, moving all 20,000 units it produced. Its Burnt Hair perfume, priced around $100 a bottle, sold out fast enough that scalpers were flipping units on eBay for ten times the retail price. Boring Bricks, made from tunneling spoil, followed the same playbook of teasing a product on X months before it became real.
Musk has not said what the actual item will be, only that it involves uranium and glows in the dark. Given the pattern, that vagueness is probably intentional. Past merch announcements have started as one-line jokes and taken weeks or months to turn into an actual product listing on the company’s site, and there is no guarantee this one follows through at all.
The timing lines up with a period of real momentum for the Boring Company outside of the joke merchandise. The company said last week it plans to double the number of operational stations on its Vegas Loop by the end of the year, a target tied to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers. Prufrock-5, one of the company’s tunnel boring machines, also just wrapped a test tunnel in Bastrop, Texas, and is expected to relaunch on its next assignment in November.
Whether the uranium joke turns into an actual product remains to be seen. Musk’s post did not include a price, a shipping date, or even a name for the item, which has historically meant a Boring Company website page goes up quietly, password protected, sometime before an announcement.
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
