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Tesla to offer ‘Premium Connectivity’ internet package starting July 1
Tesla will be introducing new cellular connectivity packages for the Model S, Model X, and Model 3 starting July 1. According to the California-based electric car maker, Tesla owners who order their vehicles from July 1 moving forward will have the option to select between a “Premium Connectivity” package and a “Standard Connectivity” package. The new internet packages would be rolled out to all of Tesla’s markets, including Europe, Australia, and Asia.
The Premium Connectivity package includes satellite maps with live traffic visualizations and satellite-view maps. In-car streaming music and media, as well as over-the-air updates via cellular data, are also included in the package, together with other applications and services that are set to be introduced in the future. Full pricing and details are expected to be announced soon, but Tesla expects the internet package to cost roughly $100 per year, or $8.34 per month.
Customers who order a Model S, Model X, or Model 3 with the Premium Interior Package on or after July 1, 2018, will be receiving a year’s worth of Premium Connectivity for free. After the 1-year period is over, owners would be able to select the connectivity package option they prefer. Cars ordered before July 1, including Tesla’s entire fleet today, will not be impacted by the introduction of the new connectivity package options.
Tesla’s Standard Connectivity package includes basic maps and navigation, as well as music and media features through a smartphone’s Bluetooth connection. Over-the-air updates are downloaded through WiFi, though Tesla states that firmware updates related to vehicle safety would be received through cellular at no extra cost. Customers can upgrade to the Premium Connectivity package at any time through the electric cars’ center console.
The main difference between Tesla’s two internet packages lies in live traffic visualization, firmware updates, and in-car streaming. While all vehicles regardless of internet package would feature Tesla’s new and improved Navigation, electric cars with the Standard Connectivity package would not see live traffic visualizations, which are represented by green, orange, and red lines on the vehicle’s maps. The internet browser for the Model S and Model X and music streaming using the car’s cellular data itself would also be unavailable.
Tesla’s improved Navigation, pictured here, would still be accessible to Tesla vehicles with Standard Connectivity packages. [Credit: Black Tesla via YouTube]
Particularly admirable, however, is the fact that all current Teslas on the road today will have the Premium Connectivity package for free for the lifetime of the vehicles. This is a pleasant surprise considering the company’s expectations outlined on its Q4 2013 Shareholder Letter, where Tesla noted that Model S customers would get free data connectivity for four years before the company starts charging for cellular data use.
“To further enhance the driver experience, new Model S customers will now receive free data connectivity and internet radio for four years. As an added benefit to our existing Model S customers, the free four year period starts on January 1, 2014. To be fair to all, in rare cases, a customer may be charged for extreme data use.”
Overall, Tesla’s introduction of its new connectivity packages could be seen as one of the strategies that the company could adopt to achieve its target of hitting profitability by Q3 or Q4 2018. As the size of Tesla’s fleet grows, after all, it becomes more and more costly for the company to provide complimentary cellular internet access to all its vehicles on the road. At around $100 a year or roughly $8.34 per month, Tesla’s Premium Connectivity package is very reasonable, costing less than the price of LTE services for the Apple Watch Series 3, which commands an additional $10 to a mobile phone subscription on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
