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Tesla wants to abuse the Semi, and they want you to do it

Credit: Tesla

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Tesla wants to torture test the Semi as it is hiring a Senior Test Engineer for Abuse Test & Engineering for the all-electric Class 8 vehicle.

The job is out of Fremont, California, where the company builds all four of its signature models, the Model 3, Model Y, Model S, and Model X. The Semi is built at a lowkey facility near the Gigafactory in Reno, Nevada.

However, Tesla is looking to “test a variety of electrically abusive scenarios for power electronics and battery systems,” hoping to obtain information that would help understand why the systems might break down during day-to-day use as a logistics transport.

Tesla Semi’s intense, all-terrain testing is not for the faint of heart

Tesla says in the job posting:

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“In the Abuse Testing & Engineering group, we push energy storage and power electronics to their limits and beyond using specialized equipment to apply electrical, mechanical, and thermal stresses. Our goal is to provide rapid feedback to inform designs early in development, by understanding how robust systems perform under abusive conditions. We accommodate external regulations but have a strong focus on internal requirements and test to failure.”

Semi-trucks are some of the most heavily used vehicles on the road, and drivers can operate them for 600, or in some cases, more, miles a day. They are subjected to all types of weather scenarios, tough terrain, and other situations that can prevent things from going smoothly.

The job lists the following as the responsibilities:

  • Engage electronics and battery pack teams to understand and prioritize test needs
  • Create test plans and execute tests such as FET shoot-through, overvoltage, overcurrent, arc flash, electrical joints failure, or conductive fluid exposure.
  • Develop sub-pack-scale tests to study novel failure modes with higher fidelity
  • Develop any new test equipment needed to conduct tests
  • Anticipate and mitigate test execution hazards
  • Share results and maintain documentation to be easily referenced by other teams
  • Recreate field incidents and suggest countermeasures

The Semi is still rolling out in a controlled manner and is making its way to more customers and being added to company fleets.

Yesterday, we reported on NFI using several Semi units in its fleet and sharing valuable information on its efficiency.

I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or questions, please email me at joey@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @KlenderJoey, or if you have news tips, you can email us at tips@teslarati.com.

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Joey has been a journalist covering electric mobility at TESLARATI since August 2019. In his spare time, Joey is playing golf, watching MMA, or cheering on any of his favorite sports teams, including the Baltimore Ravens and Orioles, Miami Heat, Washington Capitals, and Penn State Nittany Lions. You can get in touch with joey at joey@teslarati.com. He is also on X @KlenderJoey. If you're looking for great Tesla accessories, check out shop.teslarati.com

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk takes aim at Bill Gates’ Microsoft with new AI venture “Macrohard”

It is quite an appropriate name for a company that’s designed to rival Microsoft.

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Credit: xAI/X

Elon Musk has set his sights on Microsoft with a new company called “Macrohard,” a software venture tied to his AI startup, xAI. 

Musk described the project as a “purely AI software company” that’s designed to generate hundreds of specialized coding and generative AI agents that could one day simulate products from companies like Microsoft entirely through artificial intelligence.

Macrohard‘s Purpose

Musk announced Macrohard on Friday, though xAI had already registered the trademark with the US Patent Office a few weeks ago, as noted in a PC Mag report. Interestingly enough, this is not the first time that Musk has mentioned such an initiative.

Just last month, he stated that xAI was “creating a multi-agent AI software company, where Grok spawns hundreds of specialized coding and image/video generation/understanding agents all working together and then emulates humans interacting with the software in virtual machines until the result is excellent.”

At the time, Musk stated that “This is a macro challenge and a hard problem with stiff competition,” hinting at the venture’s “Macrohard” moniker. A few years ago, Musk also posted “Macrohard >> Microsoft” on X. 

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Powered by xAI and Colossus

Macrohard appears to be closely linked to xAI’s Colossus 2 supercomputer project in Memphis. Musk has confirmed plans to acquire millions of Nvidia GPUs, joining rivals such as OpenAI and Meta in a high-stakes race for AI computing power. Colossus is already one of the most powerful supercomputer clusters in the world, and it is still being expanded.

xAI is only a couple of years old, having been founded in March 2023. During its Engineering Open House event in San Francisco, Elon Musk highlighted that the company’s speed will be its primary competitive edge. “No SR-71 Blackbird was ever shot down and it only had one strategy: to accelerate,” Musk said.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk confirms he’s still in wartime CEO mode

He is still locked in.

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Wcamp9, CC BY 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Elon Musk tends to use social media platform X as his personal platform to express himself, so much so that critics tend to allege that the CEO is no longer serious about his numerous companies. 

As per Musk, he is still very much in wartime CEO mode, despite all the jokes and fun posts about Ani on X. 

Elon Musk leads several prolific companies, much more than the average CEO. And while Tesla is the only publicly traded entity that he currently leads, Musk is so visible that everyone across the internet pretty much has a strong opinion of him one way or another. For his longtime supporters and followers, however, what truly matters is if Musk is locked in.

Considering that Elon Musk’s feed on X has recently been filled with AI imagery, a good portion of which involve AI-rendered women, some X users have expressed concerns that the CEO may be losing focus once more. Musk responded to one such user by highlighting his very busy schedule and his numerous active projects. 

Needless to say, Elon Musk is still locked in. He is still in “wartime CEO” mode.

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As per the CEO, even his recent AI posts about AI are “part of a broader vision and strategy.” He also highlighted that SpaceX’s Starship Flight 10 is launching in a few days, xAI’s Grok 5 is starting its training next month, and Tesla’s Autopilot V14 is also coming next month. As per Musk, “long-term strategy is compelling.”

Elon Musk’s comments are quite accurate. While he may seem to spend all his time on X, after all, he is very much still neck-deep in all his companies’ projects. There is a reason why Musk became known as a visionary, and a lot of it is because he really is intimately involved in all of his companies’ projects. 

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Tesla watchers spot mysterious castings at Fremont Factory

The castings seem to be quite new, as they do not seem to match any of the castings that are currently being used for the Model Y.

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Credit: @metgodinwilderness7130/YouTube

A recent flyover of the Fremont Factory has triggered speculations about Tesla’s ongoing initiatives that are yet to be unveiled publicly. This was hinted at by the sighting of some apparent vehicle castings around the factory that have never really been observed before.

A Fremont Factory flyover

In a recent update, drone operator Met God in Wilderness, who has been chronicling the progress and developments of the Fremont Factory for years, shared some footage from his August 14, 2025 flyover. Based on the video, the Fremont Factory seemed very much alive. Vehicles were being pumped out of the factory, and a rather interestingly covered car could be seen going around the test track.

What is quite fascinating about the footage from the Fremont Factory is the fact that the vehicles that were moving from the production line to the outbound logistics lot are not driven manually anymore. As per Tesla in previous updates, vehicles produced at the Fremont Factory navigate to the outbound logistics lot on their own using Unsupervised FSD

Mysterious castings

Perhaps most interestingly, the drone operator also managed to capture some footage of some castings that were being gathered just outside one of the facility’s sprung structures. These castings seem to be quite new, as they do not seem to match any of the castings that are currently being used for the Model Y. This has brought speculations suggesting that the new components, which seem smaller than standard Model Y megacasts, may be for a different, perhaps more compact, vehicle. 

As per Tesla in its second quarter earnings call, the company actually started the initial production of more affordable models sometime in June. These vehicles, as per Elon Musk, will be made available for consumers in the fourth quarter. “Given that we started in North America and that our goal is to maximize production with higher rates by the end of Q3, we’re going to keep pushing hard on our current models to avoid complexity… We’ll be running with the more affordable models available for everyone in Q4,” Musk said.

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Watch the recent drone footage of the Fremont Factory in the video below.

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