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Elon Musk pledges to improve Tesla’s service location coverage within 3-6 months
In a recent announcement on Twitter, Elon Musk pledged to “fix” the existing gaps in the coverage of Tesla’s service locations. According to the CEO, Tesla would aim to expand the reach of its service centers to areas beyond big North American cities within the next 3-6 months. Musk also issued the same pledge to all countries that Tesla will be operating in by the end of next year.
Just reviewed Tesla’s service locations in North America & realized we have major gaps in geographic coverage! Sorry for this foolish oversight. Tesla will aim to cover all regions of NA (not just big cities) within 3 to 6 months.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 17, 2018
Musk’s announcement on Twitter comes at a time when Tesla seems to be at the brink of reaching even more impressive milestones in vehicle delivery and production. In 2019, for one, Tesla aims to produce 10,000 Model 3 per week, resulting in a yearly output of more than 500,000 vehicles. Such a fleet requires a strong network of service centers in all areas where Teslas are being sold.
Tesla’s service centers are admittedly one of the company’s biggest points of improvement. Over the years, Tesla’s vehicles have developed the notorious reputation for being incredibly difficult to repair. Anecdotes from Tesla owners from the initial days of the Model S alone indicate that getting vehicles serviced, particularly for repairs, could become a taxing experience, partly due to the lack of spare parts and the number of certified body shops that can actually service the electric cars.
Elon Musk has since pledged to address this issue. In the 2018 Annual Shareholder Meeting, Musk discussed the expansion of Tesla Service Centers and authorized body shops. Addressing the company’s shareholders, Musk noted that year-over-year, Tesla expects to see a doubling of service center capacity for Tesla.
“We’re rapidly expanding service centers. Year over year, probably see a doubling of service center capacity for Tesla. We’re making major progress on the body-shop front. This is quite a big deal. We’re creating Tesla body shop repair locations. We should have by the end of the month in at least the Top 10 metro areas in the US being able to be serviced by a Tesla body shop. This will be a dramatic improvement in the cost and time of body repair,” Musk said.
Musk also teased the idea of launching in-house body repair shops to address damages from minor accidents quickly. Tesla launched the first set of in-house repair shops earlier this year, and so far, they seem to be working well. A Model 3 that got damaged from an accident at a parking lot, for one, was fully restored by an in-house body shop in just 25 hours.
Norwegians are right to be upset with Tesla. We are having trouble expanding our service facilities in Oslo especially. Can solve quickly with Tesla mobile service vans, but awaiting govt permission to do so.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2018
That said, Tesla’s service network still has a long way to go, particularly in foreign regions. Last July, reports emerged that Tesla owners from Norway are getting aggravated by the company’s slow service. Responding to the reports on Twitter, Elon Musk admitted that “Norwegians are right to be upset with Tesla” considering that the electric car maker is having trouble expanding its service facilities in the region.
As the impending global rollout of the Model 3 approaches, Tesla seems to be preparing itself for a massive influx of vehicles abroad. In Tilburg, Netherlands, for example, the company recently acquired an expansive facility located close to its assembly plant and delivery center. The facility, which spans 387,500 square feet (36,000 square meters), is speculated to serve as a hub where parts for vehicles are stored and distributed to surrounding regions. Considering that a shortage of parts is among the problems that plague owners, the Tilburg hub would likely play a vital role in ensuring that Tesla’s service networks are fully equipped and ready to address owner’s concerns in a timely manner.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
The in-car Tesla Theater is among the most unique features available within the cars. When charging, parked, camping, or just hanging out, vehicle occupants can access a variety of streaming platforms on the large center screen, helping keep them entertained during downtime.
However, the Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms, something that owners have requested for some time.
Tesla owners recently discovered that visiting Apple TV in the vehicle browser can launch a fullscreen interface that looks and behaves like a dedicated application rather than an ordinary webpage:
Today I learned that if you go to Apple TV in the Tesla browser, it will open up an actual Apple TV app, fully functional. Not just the site.
Apparently there are more apps than just the few that show on the apps page. pic.twitter.com/os1Ypfm4JR
— Jason W (@jmwilt21) August 20, 2026
The experience drops the usual address bar and browser chrome, presenting catalogs, continue watching rows, and playback controls in the same window Tesla Theater already uses for its listed services. Independent testers soon found similar treatment for HBO Max, Paramount+, Peacock, Disney+, and Prime Video when those sites are opened from the car browser.
This shift is a plausible early signal that Tesla is widening Theater support without a formal software note. Theater has long been a set of web views rather than native applications, so recognizing extra domains and stripping the browser frame is a small server-side change that can expand the catalog quickly.
Owners still lack permanent Theater icons for the newly recognized services, and video remains limited to Park, yet the smoother launch is a meaningful step toward a broader lounge while charging.
Tesla Theater arrived with software version 10 in September 2019. The first video services were Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu, available only while parked and originally tied to WiFi. Spotify arrived in the same era as music rather than Theater video. Disney+ joined officially in July 2021 with the 2021.24 update, giving owners another major catalog on the center screen. Twitch and TikTok later appeared among the default Theater tiles, and Tesla Tutorials remained a persistent educational tile.
Not every addition stayed put. In December 2023, a Holiday software build removed the Disney+ tile for many United States owners after a public dispute involving advertising on X. Hulu stayed visible even though Disney owned it. Visiting disneyplus.com in the browser often restored the tile, which suggested the removal was a recognition list change rather than a complete block. Owners have also reported occasional blank Theater grids after updates, usually fixed by language toggles, resets, or later firmware.
Tesla axes Disney+ from vehicles with Musk-Iger rivalry, but there’s a workaround
Code archives from 2024 listed many unused source names, including Apple TV and Prime Video, that never became official icons, which now looks like groundwork for the current fullscreen browser behavior.
Now that this hint toward an expanded Theater experience has been recognized, Tesla could follow through with these additional shortcuts as a sign that more streaming platforms are available in Teslas than ever before.
Tesla recently received its largest order for the all-electric Semi from Einride, a Swedish transport service, for 500 units, a groundbreaking invoice to receive before the first deliveries begin.
Even more remarkable, Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said in a recent interview that he expects his company to take delivery of all 500 — the entire order — before the end of 2027. He even expects to have 75 Tesla Semi units in the Einride fleet before the end of this year.
🚨 Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli on the Tesla Semi partnership:
“If we start with the Amazon announcement that we did earlier this year, that was on the back of having gone through a proving period together with them and proving out our technology. Then we took that next step in… pic.twitter.com/oazkXjwoig
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 28, 2026
Charli said the Tesla partnership was part of a broader push, along with its earlier partnership with Amazon. Einride is assisting Amazon with the use of its Saga AI platform, which helps eliminate questions about budgeting and forecasting for logistics companies.
The Semi, as well as Tesla’s production and subsequent delivery of the units to Einride, will help the company “to have a good supply of vehicles that we can deploy on the [Saga AI] platform,” Charli said. “Tesla is also a relationship we’ve had for a while, and as the Tesla Semi deliveries are firming up, we decided to do a larger commitment to that and deploy that on our platform.”
In its initial announcement, Einride said it anticipated taking delivery of the trucks over the next two years, but now it appears the company is expecting all 500 units within the next 16 months.
Built at a dedicated factory in Sparks, Nevada, the Tesla Semi has been perhaps the biggest and most intensive testing process the company has ever had for a single vehicle model. For the past several years, Tesla has been working with many companies, most notably Frito-Lay and PepsiCo, to gain knowledge on the performance on regional routes.
Tesla plans to launch the Semi officially on September 24, five months after production started ramping.
Additionally, drivers have said they are happy about the Semi’s performance and that its numerous safety and productivity features have made their jobs and routes much easier.
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
Tesla Theater might be getting plenty more streaming platforms
