News
Tesla responds to Reuters’ claims of faulty suspension issues
Tesla has posted a rebuttal to a Reuters investigation which alleged that the company had been blaming drivers for alleged vehicle abuse despite knowing that its cars’ suspension components were faulty. The issue has caught the attention of many, including Democratic Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), both of whom have called on Tesla to initiate a recall about the reported issue.
Reuters‘ investigation indicated that Tesla had informed the NHTSA that frequent failures of components like its vehicles’ aft link were due to drive misuse. Despite this, the publication claimed that Tesla’s own engineers have tracked frequent failures of the components over the years. Tesla’s response, which was posted on X, provided a thorough rebuttal of the publication’s claims.
Tesla highlighted several issues with Reuters‘ investigation, such as its misleading headline and the lack of important context about the issue. The company also reiterated its service principles, which aim to provide the best support possible to its consumer base.
Reuters published an article that leads with a wildly misleading headline and is riddled with incomplete and demonstrably incorrect information.
This latest piece vaguely and nonsensically suggests there are thousands upon thousands of disgruntled Tesla customers. It’s…— Tesla (@Tesla) December 27, 2023
Following is Tesla’s response to Reuters‘ investigation.
Reuters published an article that leads with a wildly misleading headline and is riddled with incomplete and demonstrably incorrect information.
This latest piece vaguely and nonsensically suggests there are thousands upon thousands of disgruntled Tesla customers. It’s nonsensical because it’s nonfactual—the reality is Tesla’s customer retention is among the best and highest in the industry.
Misleading headline:
“Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective.”
Reality (buried in the article):
Tesla paid for most of the 120,000 vehicle repairs under warranty.
Manufactured story:
The customer photo represents not a failed component, but instead a post crash component that was damaged in the course of reducing the adverse effects of a collision. The customer was informed that Tesla was able to review the telemetry and understood there was a crash that resulted in this repair not being covered by warranty.
Most, if not all, manufacturer warranties exclude damages caused by a crash because that is the point of insurance coverage.
Helpful context:
Tesla has the most advanced vehicle telemetry system that can identify emerging issues, determine scope, and allow for faster vehicle and service improvements than has ever been seen in the auto industry. We take action as soon as we see a problem, something that should be celebrated as best-in-class, and is often cited by our regulators as a major safety advantage.
False accusation:
The author has conflated a noise-related (non-safety) issue with a range of unrelated and disconnected service actions. Contrary to the article’s statements based on erroneous data, Tesla is truthful and transparent with our safety regulators around the globe and any insinuation otherwise is plain wrong.
Tesla Service Principles:
a. Our service technicians and advisors diagnose, maintain and fix our customers’ cars efficiently and are not incentivized to profit off customers’ repair needs.
b. Tesla provides our service employees with excellent compensation and benefits packages. They don’t work off of commission like at other dealers who are incentivized to upsell or overcharge their customers.
c. The best service is no service. When service must be done, we fix 90%+ problems without even needing the customer present – either through over-the-air updates or with mobile service at a customer’s house or workplace.
To see Tesla’s approach in action, one can refer to this maintenance study from earlier this year, “Tesla was named the cheapest luxury car brand to maintain..” → https://autos.yahoo.com/tesla-named-cheapest-luxury-car-110000613.html
This cherry-picking approach to journalism results in missing the truth, which is a pattern in many of the negative articles about Tesla.
Using one customer’s one-sided version of events as the universal experience of all customers paints a false and misleading picture of Tesla. In reality, for every upset customer, there are hundreds more who are thrilled with their Tesla and eager to repeat their business. The numbers don’t lie in terms of repeat sales and customer satisfaction.
We strive to make every customer a lifelong member of the Tesla family.
While others may have their own agendas, our principles have been the same since the beginning: to make the safest cars in the world, which are easiest to maintain, while accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.
Don’t hesitate to contact us with news tips. Just send a message to simon@teslarati.com to give us a heads up.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
News
Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.
News
Tesla just made its headlights even better through a software update
Tesla just upgraded its headlights through a software update, making them even better without any physical or hardware upgrade.
Tesla’s latest software update is quietly improving nighttime driving for a small number of owners. Version 2026.38 includes a new capability called Dynamic Headlight Leveling.
The feature automatically adjusts the aim of the low beams in response to driving conditions and nearby traffic, with the goal of giving the driver more usable light on the road while reducing glare for oncoming vehicles and traffic ahead.
2026.38 just dropped.
Model 3 gets Dynamic Headlight Leveling — low beams auto-aim around traffic for max visibility, less glare. Model 3 / Y (AMD HW3) also pick up sharper Tesla visuals + an enhanced park scene on the center display.
Legacy Intel cars get Supercharger Site… pic.twitter.com/45ac4AH6Vs
— Frunk To Trunk (@FrunkToTrunk) September 30, 2026
Unlike Tesla’s matrix high-beam system, which selectively dims individual LED segments to create shadows around other cars, Dynamic Headlight Leveling physically tilts the low-beam projectors. Internal motors respond to changes in vehicle pitch.
When the car accelerates hard, climbs a steep grade, or carries extra weight in the rear, the headlights can otherwise point higher than intended. The software counters that movement in real time so the beam stays aimed at the road surface rather than into the eyes of other drivers.
Early indications reveal the update is reaching a limited set of vehicles, including certain Model 3 and Cybertruck examples in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. The rollout does not appear tied to a single hardware revision, and Tesla has not published a broader schedule. It is simply a common waiting game until your car receives it.
The change arrives against a backdrop of wider complaints about headlight glare. Some earlier Model 3 and Model Y vehicles were the subject of an NHTSA recall related to excessive low-beam glare; the software adjustment offers a potential mitigation for cars equipped with the necessary leveling hardware. It does not replace adaptive high beams where those are already available, nor does it alter the basic low-beam pattern itself.
Instead, it keeps an existing beam pointed where it is most useful.
For drivers who have received the update, the system requires no new settings or user input. The headlights simply respond as road conditions and traffic change. As the feature reaches more vehicles, it adds another example of Tesla using over-the-air software to refine existing hardware rather than waiting for a new model year. Nighttime visibility and reduced glare for others are the practical results owners are expected to notice first.