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Tesla vehicle reviews are pointless…Here’s why

Credit: Tesla

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This is a preview from 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. 

Tesla vehicle reviews are probably one of the most worthless things to read, in my own opinion, especially if they’re coming from a large group or entity with interests that anyone can trace through the money. Earlier this week, Edmunds put up a scathing review of the Model S Plaid, calling it “a waste of money” and saying it was nothing more than a marketing tool to make an aging vehicle relevant once again. Despite these words, which caught the attention of many readers within the first 48 hours, the Edmunds driver couldn’t wipe the large, shining smile from his face as he felt the instant torque of the vehicle take off like a rollercoaster.

For something that is such a waste, it sure provided a lot of enjoyment to the Edmunds staff. Of course, vehicle performance is not necessarily a baseline for whether an automobile is “good” or not. If a car is fast, people will like it because fast cars are just fun to be in, whether you’re a driver or a passenger. However, reviews on electric cars, Teslas in specific, do not get a fair shake, and it’s not necessarily anyone’s fault, per se. Instead, I see it as an opportunity for people to put their opinions out there without speaking in generalities or thinking their point of view is a fact. Of course, you could say the same about this newsletter.

For me, the comprehension of electric cars, Teslas in specific, needs to be examined by someone seasoned and completely understanding what is going on under the hood (I use that term loosely, now) because without the basic comprehension of what you’re driving, you really are not qualified to speak on it. Additionally, whether something is a “waste of money” really comes down to the consumer. If you’re buying a Model S Plaid for the performance statistics, you’re getting the fastest car in the world for millions of dollars less than its competitors. Sure, if you’re buying it for range and a daily driver, it could be considered a “waste” as the Long Range variant is likely a better option. However, some people realize they won’t have their money forever, and the additional $40,000 cost is simply arbitrary in their point of view.

For me, there are just too many factors as to why reviews are pointless when it comes to certain cars, especially with fast ones. I will discuss a few of them here, and I look forward to hearing your point of view with the others.

Credit: Tesla

Internal Interests

Tesla fans are quick to point out when a product gets a negative review or any sort of pushback. Many of them claim inside interests without really doing their own due diligence, claiming that some entities have their pockets lined with oil money or anything else the mind can grasp. Sometimes, however, they’re not far off. CarMax purchased Edmunds back in April, which means that the company is no longer independent and is owned by a large company with ties with Chrysler, Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Nissan.

It is always important to see what interests some entities have when they speak about a car or any product, for that matter. Simply enough, people with the ability to put their name on an article or a video and put it out there for millions of people to digest have a responsibility to remain partial. It doesn’t always work that way.

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Opinionated Points on Features

This is one of my biggest points. Edmunds was quick to dismiss the usefulness of the Yoke, claiming that “the Yoke was a Joke.” Yes, they really wrote that on Twitter.

The thing is, I have monitored the Yoke since it was going to be included in the Model S, and while I have spoken to numerous government agencies and Tesla employees about the Yoke, the wheel is really personal preference. The car is obviously built for performance, and performance vehicles, especially open-wheeled cars, like F1 series vehicles, use a Yoke for complete control at high speeds. It is likely Tesla didn’t go with the Yoke for this reason, but it may have included it as a hint toward a steering wheel-less cockpit in the future. That’s my idea, anyway, especially as the company surges toward autonomy.

I have NEVER come across a single person who has disliked driving the Yoke for what it’s worth.

Of course, a review does include some personal preference, and that’s expected. However, to slash a vehicle in this way that is likely the most advanced car on the market in terms of software, performance, and technology in this way smells of too much opinion, for me. Stick to the facts, is it a good car? Is it functional? Does it do what the automaker said it would do?

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Cars are made to be tested individually

The most logical way to know if a car is for you is to drive it yourself. You should never go off of someone else’s opinion completely. It makes no sense to do this. If cars were meant to be bought off of the basis of someone else’s experience, nobody would drive PT Cruisers (they’re horribly ugly), and everyone would drive what someone else wanted them to drive. Let’s not forget: Cars, while a meaningful portion of life because they get us to work, events, and anywhere we need to go, are supposed to be enjoyable and fun. Not one person on this Earth wants to drive a car they hate if they don’t have to. Hell, when my Dad bought me a 2003 Taurus in college because my Jetta died, I hated it. It was like driving a boat. I was embarrassed by the putrid blue color. I hated the seats, the stereo, and in the winter, I had to keep one hand on the driver’s door because the latch wouldn’t work, and the part was on backorder. There is nothing like driving on the interstate to get to class on time and holding the door shut for dear life, hoping you don’t roll out. I had no other choice, I was a broke college kid, and it was a car that got me from Point A to Point B. But I will never again drive a car I hate.

The thing is, someone I went to high school with loved their 2003 Taurus. They talked about its powerful V6 engine and its fine leather interior. It was a car they enjoyed. I am sure it was a nice car, I didn’t like it.

This goes to my point: Just because someone else hates it and thinks it is a pile of junk doesn’t mean it actually is. It’s just an opinion. Do you want to know if a car is good or not? Drive it yourself and tell your friends what you thought of it. Your opinion of the car won’t change theirs.

I will say this: It is important to have these pieces of literature to show us the negative portions of a car. Like if the software isn’t great, or the touchscreen is not very responsive, or if the center console doesn’t move properly. Those are understandable pieces of criticism, but none of them are opinionated. If the software isn’t great, people will see that. It might keep them from buying a car prematurely.

With all of that being said, there is plenty of evidence to suggest the Plaid Model S is a great vehicle, and there is other evidence that suggests Tesla has things to work on. Whichever side of the ball you’re on, believe in your opinion, but be open to other’s points as well. Additionally, make the final decision about a car on your own time, don’t go off of someone else’s words. That’s how you end up with something that you really do not enjoy driving.

A big thanks to our long-time supporters and new subscribers! Thank you.

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I use this newsletter to share my thoughts on what is going on in the Tesla world. If you want to talk to me directly, you can email me or reach me on Twitter. I don’t bite, be sure to reach out!

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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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.

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An artist’s illustration of a SpaceX Starfall capsule reentering Earth’s atmosphere. (Image: SpaceX)

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.

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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.

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Grok Bot users hit with weekly limits early, Elon Musk explains what happened

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Credit: Grok Bot

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.”

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.


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.

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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.


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.

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