Tesla’s salvaged vehicles make for an excellent project for rebuilders, or a chance to have an industry-leading electric car for a discounted price. Some members of the community have even made the act of rebuilding wrecked or damaged Teslas a career, like Rich Rebuilds, who runs a prominent YouTube channel. However, Tesla stopped allowing Supercharging on their salvaged vehicles in February 2020. This move ended fast charging capabilities for the owners of wrecked and refurbished Teslas, but now rebuilders are reporting that the electric vehicle company is taking away more functions.
We received a tip from a Tesla salvager who says the company is now refusing to update ownership records, nor will it activate the smartphone application, which enables some functions for the electric vehicle in question. However, Tesla has a reason for doing this, and it has to do with revenue and passenger safety, which is something the company is under a microscope for from its harshest critics.
But the real reason we are talking about it this week is because there is a valid argument for both points of view, and both should be examined in an open platform. When you decide which side you are on, please e-mail me and let me know your thoughts.
First, let’s look at the side of the salvagers. They have a few main points on why taking away vehicle privileges is wrong. One issue is the fact that salvaged Teslas, if not repaired and resold, will end up sitting in a landfill for basically the remainder of the time.
It is a shame that a car that is capable of repair could end up in a landfill to sit and rot away for the rest of time. Not only is it a waste of space, but its a waste of a perfectly good high-performance vehicle. Not to mention, project cars are a hobby and a career for some. Eliminating the possibility of preparing or working on a Tesla electric vehicle to bring it back to life reduces the industry of bringing the cars back to life.
Next, the revitalization of these salvaged vehicles creates an opportunity for a more affordable Tesla ownership experience for some. Rebuilding vehicles creates profit for the person responsible for bringing the car back to a driveable state. At the same time, the owner can sometimes receive a discounted price on a perfectly drivable vehicle that could have low miles.
The industry of rebuilding crashed, or damaged cars are advantageous for multiple parties financially. The issue is the cars are not always repaired by mechanics properly, which can lead to quality and safety issues down the line. However, this could be another opportunity for Tesla to train salvagers, mechanics, and collision repair technicians across the world. The idea of making repair seminars or courses available for those who plan to revitalize a Tesla vehicle could lead to an influx of people who are familiar with the cars inside and out.
To the flip side, Tesla’s arguments are just as reliable as those of the rebuilders. Tesla has maintained a reputation for having extremely safe vehicles that are capable of saving people from severe injuries when they are involved in scary and violent accidents. When cars are damaged and end up in salvage yards, ending up in the hands of those who are interested in repairing them, they are never really the same. The most severely damaged cars can have chassis and build issues that can never be fixed fully, only masked, and pushed as close to perfect as possible. They’ll never be “factory issue,” and they’ll never drive precisely how they would when they rolled out of a production facility. However, they can be fabricated, rewelded, and adjusted to specifications that are incredibly close to how Tesla intended them to be. But this is a case that would require the individual inspection of each repaired vehicle by a Tesla representative. With 1,000,000 Tesla vehicles manufactured in the company’s history, this would be near impossible, even if .01% of them were salvaged and repaired.
The likelihood of a Tesla rep traveling to the location of a rebuilt vehicle and going through hours of inspection: making sure all parts of the car are correctly installed, properly connected, and aligned safely would not be cost-effective, smart, or worth Tesla’s time. However, it would be necessary. Like I said before, this company has a reputation for building safe cars. When someone in a Tesla gets in an accident, the short sellers and the Elon haters come out of the woodwork looking for answers. Why? So if someone got hurt, or heaven forbid, killed in an accident, they could use it as justification that the cars are not as safe as Tesla advertises, and somehow that means Elon is a fraud.
It is a ridiculous train of thought. I’ll never understand Tesla’s short-sellers celebrating other people’s injuries. Instead of rooting for someone to get hurt, why not root for the company to make safer cars? It would only make other automakers want to match Tesla’s quality, and it wouldn’t be such a horrible thing to have more safe vehicles on the road.
Regardless, Tesla has to account for the fact that if someone gets hurt in a revitalized vehicle that was formerly a salvage, it will be a never-ending storm of media harassment. I can see the misleading headlines now…”Driver killed in Tesla proving cars aren’t so safe after all,” or something to that effect. It is a risk that they simply cannot take, and it is not worth the company’s future.
Additionally, Tesla makes money when they sell new cars, not when people buy wrecked ones and decide to rebuild them. Let’s not forget, this is a car company, and ultimately a business. While Tesla’s mission is to provide people with safe and affordable electric vehicles that benefit our environment and our well-being, they need to make money.
In the end, Tesla’s decision, while financial, is also a safety issue. Sure, Elon would love to see some custom projects. I’d bet he would like to see his cars developed into something different than what Tesla builds in their factories. But I also bet that he wouldn’t want someone to get hurt or killed as a result of negligence while refurbishing a vehicle. Ultimately, it would end up being blood on his hands, and this risk makes it entirely too risky from a business standpoint.
While people are still free to rebuild the cars, they will undoubtedly run into roadblocks—no Supercharging, issues with transferring ownership titles, so on and so forth. Tesla is doing it for money, but it is also doing it for safety. In the big picture, that’s why I think what they are doing is okay, even though I feel for the rebuilders.
Welcome to a FREE preview of our weekly newsletter. Each week I go ‘Beyond the News’ and handcraft a special edition that includes my thoughts on the biggest stories, why it matters, and how it could impact the future.
A big thanks to our long-time supporters and new subscribers! Thank you.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.
The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”
MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.
Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.
Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here.
Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start?
And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August! pic.twitter.com/TTrMql2aRg
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) June 17, 2026
It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.
Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.
With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Elon Musk
SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app
SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.
SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.
Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.
Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.
Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.
Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
