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Tesla Semi gets ‘peppy and quiet’ hydrogen fuel cell competitor from Kenworth-Toyota
With support from the California Air Resources Board, Japanese auto giant Toyota and truck maker are collaborating to develop and build a limited run of hydrogen fuel trucks. The vehicles, which are Kenworth T680 trucks modified with Toyota’s hydrogen fuel cell powertrains, are expected to drive on routes around Los Angeles and further inland to San Bernardino. The actual specs of the vehicles have not been announced by either company, but the range of the hydrogen fuel cell T680 trucks are said to be 300 miles in “normal drayage operating conditions.”
Toyota and Paccar, the parent company behind Kenworth, took the wraps off the first hydrogen fuel cell long-hauler at this month’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The vehicle, which is classified as a Class 8 truck, stands to be a possible competitor for upcoming all-electric trucks like the Tesla Semi in the future. In a statement to CNBC, Brian Lindgren, Kenworth’s director of research and development, noted that utilizing hydrogen as a source of propulsion makes more sense for Class 8 vehicles than batteries, which power vehicles like Tesla’s all-electric long-hauler.
“We believe that carrying energy in the form of hydrogen for heavy-duty Class 8 trucks makes more sense than carrying it in batteries because the trucks can be refilled faster and offer longer range,” he said.
Lindgren’s point about faster refilling times for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is quite justified, considering that a passenger car such as a Toyota Mirai could refill its tank with around 300 miles of range in roughly five minutes. That’s significantly faster than Tesla’s Superchargers, which are capable of charging roughly 200 miles of range in 30 minutes. Larger vehicles such as the hydrogen-electric Kenworth T680 trucks would likely take longer to refill than a passenger car such as the Mirai, but there’s a good chance that the long-hauler could still refill its tank faster than the Tesla Semi could charge its batteries, even if it is plugged into the upcoming Megacharger Network.
Toyota-Paccar’s Kenworth T680 hybrid fuel cell trucks caught the attention of some CES attendees due to the vehicle’s silent operation, which is nearly comparable to an all-electric truck. Lindgren, for his part, noted that drivers who have operated the truck actually appreciated the silence of the vehicle. “Drivers like these trucks because they are peppy and quiet,” he said.
Andy Lund, the Toyota chief engineer on the project, further stated that the hydrogen-electric trucks would have the same payload capacity as a diesel rig. Unlike its fossil fuel-powered counterparts, the hydrogen fuel cell Kenworth T680 long-haulers would only require a four-speed transmission, which is far simpler than the 18-gear transmissions usually fitted on Class 8 diesel trucks.
If there is one thing that would probably go against Toyota and Paccar’s hydrogen trucks, though, it would be their fuel efficiency. Kenworth’s director of research and development noted that the prototype trucks currently consume hydrogen at roughly the same rate as present diesel trucks, at around 5-7 mpg. The only advantage of the vehicles, of course, is that the trucks would only produce water vapor from their exhausts. This is a substantial advantage, considering that the trucking industry accounts for about 23% of carbon emissions from transportation in 2016, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
That said, this would be something that Tesla could capitalize on. During the electric long-hauler’s unveiling, Musk noted that the Semi would cost operators $1.26 per mile to run, less than the standard $1.51 per mile that diesel-powered vehicles cost. Musk’s estimate has been met by skepticism by veterans of the trucking industry, but if the Tesla Semi’s operating costs stay true to the CEO’s estimate, then the vehicle would most certainly give itself a notable advantage over diesel and hydrogen-powered rivals when it starts operating on America’s roads.
Hydrogen fuel cells remain a polarizing solution for sustainable transportation. Elon Musk, for one, has openly discussed his dislike for hydrogen-electric transportation. In a statement to Autocar in 2014, for one, Musk went so far as to describe hydrogen fuel cell systems as “mind-bogglingly stupid.”
“They’re mind-bogglingly stupid. You can’t even have a sensible debate. Consider the whole fuel cell system against a Model S. It’s far worse in volume and mass terms, and far, far, worse in cost. And I haven’t even talked about hydrogen being so hard to handle. Success is simply not possible. Manufacturers do it [FCEVs] because they’re under pressure to show they’re doing something ‘constructive’ about sustainability. They feel it’s better to be working on a solution a generation away rather than something just around the corner. Hydrogen is always labeled the fuel of the future – and always will be,” Musk said.
Elon Musk initially announced that the Tesla Semi would start production sometime in 2019. That said, later statements from Tesla’s head of investor relations Martin Viecha suggested that the electric car maker would “earnestly” start producing the Semi by 2020.
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SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront
SpaceX now pitches Starfall missions with 1,000 kg payloads, weeks of microgravity, and Starlink connectivity.
SpaceX has put up a dedicated commercial page for Starfall, its disk shaped reentry capsule, laying out for the first time what customers actually get when they book a flight. The page, live at spacex.com/starfall, pitches “affordable, routine access to microgravity” and invites companies to get in touch about flying manufacturing, research or testing payloads.
The specs are short and specific. Each Starfall mission carries up to 1,000 kg of payload, supplies 1 kW of power and connects through an Ethernet interface. Mission length is tailored to the customer, and the payload stays online the entire time through Starlink, which means researchers can pull data from an experiment while it is still in orbit instead of waiting for splashdown.
SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space
SpaceX is aiming the service at three markets. Biomedical customers are told they can grow stem cell organoids, replacement tissue and layered biomaterials. Pharmaceutical companies are pitched on protein and small molecule drug crystals, which form smaller and more uniform shapes without gravity driven convection. Materials science rounds out the list, with semiconductors and other next generation materials grown in vacuum and microgravity.
The page also makes clear which rocket SpaceX is counting on. “By launching on Starship, Starfall brings a reliable and scalable cadence previously unavailable to the market,” the company wrote, contrasting weeks of continuous microgravity with the seconds offered by drop towers and parabolic flights. No price or first operational flight date is listed.
The commercial push is a sharp turn from how Starfall started. SpaceX said almost nothing about the capsule ahead of its first flight in June, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings describing a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that can return 2,200 pounds of cargo. By its second flight on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare in October, Starfall was listed by name on the mission page, though SpaceX still did not say what it carried.
Customers appear to be lining up. SpaceX said in its third quarter results that it signed three commercial Starfall missions during the quarter. On the earnings call, President Gwynne Shotwell described the capsule as providing “routine relatively low cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes,” and said the three new missions would fly on Starship.
The branding effort extends past the website. SpaceX added a Starfall T-shirt to its online store on Monday as part of a batch of new merchandise, giving the program a place next to Starship, Starlink and Starshield in the company’s lineup.
The move also puts SpaceX in more direct competition with companies it launches. Varda Space Industries, which has built much of the in-space manufacturing market so far, flew its W-Series 7 capsule on the same Bandwagon-5 mission as Starfall in October. Varda’s capsules are roughly three times smaller than Starfall, and SpaceX controls the ride to orbit for both.
Starfall’s near term cadence depends on Starship. SpaceX is preparing for Flight 15 after completing static fires of Ship 42 and its Super Heavy booster in late October, and is aiming to catch both stages with the launch tower on that flight.
Elon Musk said weeks ago during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call that the company’s Grok Bot, its autonomous AI Agent platform, was showing “the fastest growth of a product” that he’d ever seen in his life.
Now, SpaceXSI is scaling back Grok Bot users’ weekly limits, much to the surprise of those who have relied on it to take away monotonous tasks in their lives.
Elon Musk’s terse November 1 reply on X captured a sharp tension in the early days of agentic AI. Responding to a user who asked for a Grok Bot usage reset after hitting 100 percent with four days still left on the weekly cycle, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
@DogecoinNorway The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The post arrived amid a wave of similar complaints from paying subscribers whose meters had jumped unexpectedly toward or to the limit, sometimes overnight and with little corresponding activity. It also stood in clear contrast to statements Musk had made only days and weeks earlier.
On the SpaceX third-quarter earnings call in mid-to-late October, Musk had described Grok Bot in almost the opposite terms. He called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and said he had “never seen anything grow this fast.”
Company figures put paid weekly users at roughly 800,000 earlier in the month, more than doubling over the prior period. Daily active users had climbed from under 100,000 in early September to over 600,000 by late October.
Musk emphasized that the product has no free tier and that users appear to be getting real value beyond what they pay. In other remarks, he noted that usage per user was rising rather than declining, the opposite of the usual decay pattern for new software.
Grok Bot, launched around August, functions as an always-available agent with its own persistent cloud computer; it can schedule, research, shop, browse, and execute multi-step workflows even after the user steps away. Access is bundled into X subscription tiers (roughly $30, $100, and $200 per month) and certain Cursor plans, drawing from shared weekly usage pools whose exact sizes have not been publicly detailed.
The economics of that model are what Musk’s November 1 post put in the spotlight. Agentic systems burn far more compute than ordinary chatbot exchanges. Each task can trigger repeated model calls, tool use, web actions, and sustained background work.
When growth is as rapid as Musk celebrated, the absolute compute bill scales quickly even if average revenue per user stays fixed under flat monthly subscriptions. Industry observers noted the opportunity cost as well: the same GPUs can be rented to other AI labs at higher rates.
A simple back-of-the-envelope comparison circulating after the post illustrated the gap: if every reported daily user paid the top tier, annualized subscription revenue would still be modest relative to the scale of compute infrastructure SpaceX is building and leasing to companies like Anthropic.
Some users also reported possible dashboard anomalies around the same period, though Musk’s framing treated the underlying cost-revenue imbalance as the core issue rather than a pure metering glitch.
The juxtaposition is the core of this exchange. Within roughly two weeks of publicly framing Grok Bot as an unprecedented success with strong unit economics and no free tier, Musk acknowledged that serving the same product had become unsustainable relative to the revenue it generates.
For the broader industry, the episode underscores a structural challenge of the agent era: demand is real and growing faster than many expected, yet the cost of fulfilling that demand through always-on, multi-step agents can outrun subscription pricing before companies can adjust limits, introduce metered billing, or raise prices.
Musk’s reply did not promise an immediate reset or higher allowances; it simply stated the constraint. In doing so, it supplied a rare, explicit public data point on the unit economics of a high-profile AI agent just as adoption numbers were still being celebrated as the fastest in Musk’s experience.
The tension between rapid, paid growth and the compute required to deliver it is now on the record.
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Tesla owners who tap Emergency Drive Away for fun are in for a surprise
Tapping Activate on Tesla’s Emergency Drive Away reportedly triggers a $539 service bill without moving.
Tesla owners who press Activate on Emergency Drive Away may be on the hook for a service bill even if their car never leaves the Supercharger stall.
Yaro, who posts about Tesla service cases on X as @Tutrifour, said a customer called after tapping Activate while still plugged into a Supercharger. The owner was about to pull away, remembered the cable was still connected and stopped. The car never moved, but the touchscreen showed a red alert reading “Emergency Drive Away has been activated” with “Service is required” underneath. A Service Mode screenshot showed the active alert BMS_a228_EmergencyDriveAwayServiceRequired, which Yaro said only Tesla Service can clear.
Here is a lesson to Tesla owners. Don’t press Activate on the new Emergency Drive Away feature on your Tesla because service charges $539 to inspect the charge port and to clear the alert. Yes, even if you didn’t move the car an inch. https://t.co/NZJENw4SQv
— Yaro (@Tutrifour) October 30, 2026
The cost of clearing it was the bigger surprise. “Don’t press Activate on the new Emergency Drive Away feature on your Tesla because service charges $539 to inspect the charge port and to clear the alert. Yes, even if you didn’t move the car an inch,” Yaro wrote. The $539 figure comes from that single case, and Tesla has not published a set price for the inspection or commented on the post. Yaro also noted that the car would still charge with the alert on screen.
Tesla launched Emergency Drive Away on October 1 with software update 2026.38.3, letting drivers pull away from a U.S. Supercharger with the cable still attached, as Teslarati reported. To use it, a driver shifts into Drive while connected, holds the brake and taps Activate. The prompt warns that driving with the cable connected will damage the vehicle and the Supercharger, and that short camera recordings will be shared with Tesla.
Tesla Charging has been clear about what follows a real activation. Repairs to a Supercharger stall can run up to $25,000 depending on the site, a service visit for the car’s charge port is mandatory, and deliberate misuse “will invoke additional penalties.” What the company had not spelled out is that the service requirement is triggered the moment Activate is pressed, not the moment the cable breaks away.
From an engineering standpoint, that is the cautious choice. Once Activate is pressed, the car cannot be sure the charge port latch was not stressed, so flagging it for inspection removes the guesswork. It also means the button carries a price on its own, which is a stronger deterrent against casual use than any warning screen.
Customer called because they have an active alert after tapping ACTIVATE on the new Emergency Drive Away feature. They didn’t actually drive away but were about to until they “remembered” they had the charge cable connected.
This alert can only be cleared by Tesla Service. https://t.co/SkHyJJPFwU
— Yaro (@Tutrifour) October 28, 2026
The report follows the feature’s first known real world use, when a driver in Austin during F1 weekend appeared to trigger it by accident and dragged the Supercharger cable along with the car. The Reddit user who filmed it said the driver seemed to have only half read the prompts.
For owners, the takeaway is to treat the red prompt as a stop sign. If it appears after shifting out of Park by mistake, shift back and unplug the normal way from the touchscreen, the Tesla app or the button on the charge handle. Activate is meant for moments when staying at the stall is the bigger risk, and Tesla is now pricing it that way.
SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront
Grok Bot users hit with weekly limits early, Elon Musk explains what happened
