Lifestyle
Tesla Roadster celebrates 10-year production anniversary
The original Tesla Roadster is celebrating its 10th anniversary today, with the Elon Musk-led firm declaring the official start of the car’s production on March 17, 2008. Back then, everything was different for Tesla, but some of the problems it was facing were quite similar to those the company is facing now.
Ten years ago, Tesla, then a small electric car startup, was struggling to meet the demand for its first and only offering — a high-performance electric car dubbed the Roadster. The car proved popular enough that Tesla had a list of reservations for the vehicles. During that time, Tesla’s target was producing one Roadster per week; and even then, there were delays in the production of the vehicle.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk would later state that the Roadster “broke down all the time and really didn’t work.” Despite this, however, the original Roadster was pivotal in shifting the public’s perception of electric cars. No longer were electric vehicles glorified golf carts that run out of charge after a few miles. The Roadster was fast, sleek, and it had decent range — a combination that Tesla would ultimately adopt for the rest of its lineup.
In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle, filmmaker Chris Paine, who directed the 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car and its sequel, the 2011 follow-up titled Revenge of the Electric Car, was one of those who placed reservations for the original Tesla Roadster. According to the director, he was not even sure if he would ever get the car or get a refund for his reservation, considering Tesla’s startup status.
Paine described a meeting with then-Tesla chairman Elon Musk, where they visited the Roadster’s assembly plant at Menlo Park. The building had a number of Roadsters in it, but Tesla could not ship because they had issues. Paine had a camera crew with him, and in front of the camera, Musk approached Roadster No.23 and asked about the car’s problem. A Tesla employee told Musk that the vehicle’s drivetrain was acting up. Paine then realized that the white No.23 Roadster was his own reservation. Musk, for his part, found the situation quite humorous.
“This is your car? This is actually your car? OK! Well, you’ve heard the explanation now. So I guess hopefully it’ll have a powertrain tomorrow. It’s a nice car. I was just thinking; actually, it’s a nice choice of colors,” Musk said.
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Paine eventually got his Roadster, albeit at a later than expected date. Despite Musk’s statement that the car “broke down all the time,” the filmmaker told the publication that the electric car actually turned out to be reliable. Ten years down the road, Roadster No.23 is still around, and still as fast and fun as before. Paine also noted that today, his car has turned into a novelty, even when he visits a Tesla Service Center.
“You drive the car in for service, and all the technicians come out and look at it — ‘Hey, that’s a Roadster!’ Yes, it is a weird feeling,” Paine said.
Golden Gate Electric Vehicle Association president Dan Miller also holds a special place for his original thunder gray Tesla Roadster, which he purchased back in 2011. He currently owns a Model S, but states that the first-generation Roadster is a true high-performance electric vehicle that he can actually drive like a real sports car.
“The Roadster is really driving, and the S does everything for you, especially with Autopilot. If you really want to drive, you drive the Roadster.”
Current Model X owner Tom Saxton also has fond memories of his Roadster. According to Saxton, the Roadster was not a very practical vehicle. It was small, and its luggage space was tiny. Despite this, however, Saxton noted that he just gets reactions from people when he drives the Roadster — something that he does not experience with his Model X.
“It is a very impractical car — it only holds two people and a very small amount of luggage — but it’s a lot of fun. The X is a lot more comfortable and sophisticated, but I don’t get people cheering and waving when they see me in the X,” Saxton said.
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- Credit: Casey_S
The Roadster is and will always be the car that started it all for Tesla. Now a 10-year veteran in the electric car industry, Tesla is trying to meet a far more ambitious goal than its one vehicle per week target back in 2008, with the company trying to manufacture 5,000 Model 3 per week by the end of Q2 2018. Considering its humble beginnings, Tesla’s progress in the automotive world is truly impressive.
If any, the original Tesla Roadster will likely live on longer than most automobiles. After all, just last month, Elon Musk’s space firm, SpaceX, launched the Falcon Heavy on its maiden voyage, carrying a unique payload — Musk’s own Tesla Roadster — into space. The car is now orbiting the solar system as we speak.
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The Roadster is also set to have a successor too, with Elon Musk announcing late last year that the next-generation Roadster is now under development. The next-gen Roadster is everything the original was, and more, boasting a 0-60 mph time of 1.9 seconds and a top speed of more than 250 mph, as well as 620 miles of range.
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.
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