Tesla is set to display some of the rarest and historic vehicles it developed in a new exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. After announcing a new “Inside Tesla” exhibit that highlights the company’s groundbreaking trek into electric vehicles, the Museum has finally released details on which of the automaker’s cars would be on display for fans and foes alike to gasp over.
On display at the Petersen Museum will be some of Tesla’s most unique vehicles, hailing from the roots of the company all the way to some of the most high-performance powertrains it has ever brought to testing or to the market. The exhibit features a unique display of company accolades, early projects, and continuing teases of vehicles Tesla has tried to bring to market in the past few years, but has not.
Original Tesla Roadster
While many Tesla fans and enthusiasts have likely seen the Original Tesla Roadster, it would not be a proper Tesla history exhibit without this vehicle. A symbolic car that basically encapsulates the company’s darkest days, a far cry from today, where the automaker is financially secure, the Roadster would either sink or swim Tesla. Fortunately, it was the raft Musk and other early executives needed.
Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
Other Tesla Roadsters on Display
Amongst the other Roadsters on display at the Museum will be the 2005 prototype of the Roadster, which hails back to Tesla’s earliest projects and ventures into electric vehicles. More recently, the 2020 ‘Next-Gen’ Roadster will also be on display. Despite this exciting development, the presence of this vehicle, in particular, might sting a few Petersen visitors when the exhibit opens.
Despite being dated as a 2020 vehicle since its unveiling, Tesla has failed to start manufacturing (or even plan for it) on the new Roadster, with many awaiting some development update. The $250,000 vehicle is expected to hover as well.
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- Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
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- Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
Tesla’s 1,000,000th Vehicle
Tesla’s 1,000,000th vehicle, a Multi-Coat Red Model Y, will also be displayed at the Museum’s Tesla exhibit. Built in March 2020, the 1,000,000th Model Y was a symbolic piece of history for Tesla as it had struggled and fought to become profitable for several years.
After launching the Model Y in 2020 in the U.S., it was only fitting the Model Y would be the millionth vehicle Tesla built. Surprisingly, the company only started building hundreds of thousands of cars a few quarters after this, as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to rage on.
Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
Model S Plaid Nürburgring
The Model S Plaid that ripped around Germany’s Nürburgring will also be on display at the Petersen Exhibit. This vehicle needs no introduction, it was one of the most exciting times as a journalist covering Tesla and electric vehicles that didn’t have major implications for the company’s future. It was just fun seeing how fast this car could go on one of the most challenging tracks on Earth.
Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
Tesla Cyberquad for Adults
Another Tesla project that was super exciting but has not received any updates since 2019 is the Cyberquad for Adults. After the Kids’ version was axed from shelves recently because an adult tried to ride it with a child, ruining the fun for everyone, the Adult version of the Quad is all some of us can keep hope for.
The Cyberquad was an addition to the 2019 Cybertruck unveiling event itself and was a potential addition with the purchase of the truck. However, just like the Cybertruck, the Cyberquad has not been released or built for the general public yet.
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Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
Tesla Cybertruck Prototype
The 2019 version of the Cybertruck won’t be the one that ultimately is delivered to customers when it is finally built next year, but it has a rich story. Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck in Hawthorne, California, in November 2019, which was a weird event. Nothing went according to plan, as the unbreakable Cybertruck windows broke, the design of the truck is ultimately not what Tesla will deliver to customers, and basically, everything from pricing to powertrains has changed.
Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
Model 3 and Model X OG Prototypes
These original Model 3 and Model X designs are not far off from what is still delivered today. These vehicles are both important to Tesla’s story for their own reasons, and as an essential part of the company’s history, it is nice to see them on display for Tesla fans.
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- Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
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- Credit: Petersen Auto Museum
The Inside Tesla exhibit is open to the public and tickets can be purchased at Petersen.org/Tesla. It will start on November 20 and will be available on the first floor in the Mullin Family Grand Salon and Phillip Sarofim Porte Cochere.
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below, or be sure to email me at joey@teslarati.com or on Twitter @KlenderJoey.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
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Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
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 just launched a secret payload from California
Tesla V2L adapter for Model Y stirs up a new complaint among owners
