Lifestyle
Tesla’s Biggest Enemy: The Spread of Misinformation from the Misinformed
Automotive enthusiast and former Late-Night funny guy Jay Leno hosted Elon Musk and a series of Tesla vehicles on his show, Jay Leno’s Garage, earlier this week on CNBC. While most of the “well-informed” Tesla fans (including me considering it is my job to know anything and everything going on with this company on a daily basis) found the episode to be disappointing and somewhat outdated, it was certainly a good opportunity for people who know about Tesla, but not the company’s finer points, to expand their opinions on the Cybertruck.
Nothing was more entertaining than listening to Leno and Elon Musk talk about the Cybertruck. Even though a lot of what was being said was stuff I already knew, it was cool to see someone like Leno, who has driven/owned some of the coolest cars to ever exist, nearly awestricken by the features of the all-electric pickup.
Despite a lot of super cool things, the segment was really only about 1/6th of the entire episode, while the rest of the TV time was allotted for excessive commercial breaks and a few other interesting portions of the show itself.
From past experiences, I knew mainstream media outlets would hop all over the story to give a summary of what the episode entailed. I also expected to see a lot of people who don’t follow Tesla closely give their uninformed and incorrect points of view on the truck and the company.
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I don’t mean cosmetic opinions, because those cannot be right or wrong. What irks me and really drives me wild is that in 2020, an entire eight years after the Model S was released and three years after the most affordable Tesla vehicle was unveiled to the public, people still hold this false pretense that Tesla’s cars are for the rich and the wealthy. I’m here to tell you, they are not.
The first thing I did was head to Facebook and look at the comments on CNBC’s article. Boy, was I in for a treat. The comment I really wanted to dial in on for this week’s newsletter had to do with Tesla’s rumored “inability” to offer the automotive market a reliable and affordable electric vehicle. For some reason, this is still not common knowledge, which is extremely surprising to me considering we are literally years past these cars being “new” to people.
The comment simply states: “Ok he got the technology side. Now he needs to work on the economics. These vehicles are not priced for the average person.”
I really don’t know what to say to this, and I tend to just read these kinds of comments and navigate away from them to avoid pointless arguments. Sometimes I want to get involved just to spread the narrative that Teslas are affordable, but other people usually beat me to the punch.
Some replies to the comment talked about pricing points, the most logical saying “The starting price is slated to be only a few thousand more than what most regular size trucks go for.”
For me, it is still striking that people see the cars as “luxury mobiles that only Matt Damon can afford after his biggest motion picture.” This narrative is effectively killing Tesla from growing even more than it already has in the past few years, and to me, it is the arrogance that prevents some people from doing a simple Google search to find out how much these cars cost.
The most affordable truck costs $39,900. The Base Regular Cab Ford F-150 starts at $28,745 and is missing a lot of features that most people expect with a nearly $30,000 vehicle. Even Cars.com states that one of the drawbacks of the F-150 is that Limited trim not luxurious enough, and the price of High-End configurations of the truck are very expensive. Try over $71,000 for the most expansive version of the F-150. Just a reminder that the price of the Tri-Motor Cybertruck is cheaper than that at $69,990.
Here’s my question: Why aren’t people holding this same narrative with gas trucks? Why is it super acceptable to spend $40,000 on a gas truck, but $40,000 on a Cybertruck is key for the misinformed to say that the electric vehicles manufactured by Tesla are “not priced for the average person.”
It goes past the Cybertruck. It goes to the polar opposite of the Cybertruck: The Model 3. There is a $35,000 variant of the Model 3 that is available “off-menu” which is more than affordable for most people. People will spend $40,000 on Honda Type-R and not blink twice, but a $35,000 car that you never have to put gas into is “too expensive.”
So to get to my main point, we as Tesla fans/enthusiasts/owners hold a responsibility to inform the misinformed about the benefits of owning an electric vehicle. We also hold a responsibility to inform those who have misconceptions about the car’s price. It’s not unaffordable, people just want to believe that it is (for whatever reason).
Keep the emails coming! I enjoy talking to all of you!
Elon Musk
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”
This is the future we shall bring into being pic.twitter.com/8aD0w8MDVc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026
The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.
This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.
What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.
That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Tesla is now shipping Cybercabs from Giga Texas with Starlink hardware built in as standard.
Tesla’s Cybercabs are now leaving Gigafactory Texas with Starlink hardware on the rear hatch in significant numbers, according to drone footage captured Tuesday by longtime Austin drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. Production at the factory ramped back up after the Labor Day weekend, and his flyover of the outbound lot showed rows of gold Cybercabs alongside Model Y Long Wheelbase units, many carrying the satellite module for the first time as standard equipment rather than a one off retrofit.
Giga Texas today is busy with production coming back up following the long weekend. Of interest today in the outbound lot is the appearance of hundreds of Mode; YL’s and many more Cybercabs and for the 1st time equipped with the Starlink module one the hatch in big numbers.
At… pic.twitter.com/G9yl6s51m4
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 8, 2026
Tesla first showed Starlink built into an actual Cybercab on August 10, when the Robotaxi account posted images of a single gold unit with the antenna integrated into the roofline above the taillights and called it the first Cybercab with Starlink integration. That followed a July reveal where Tesla and Starlink jointly posted a cutaway diagram of the antenna placement without a working vehicle to back it up. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software, said at the time that the connection isn’t required for the car to drive itself. It exists mainly for navigation, customer service and keeping tabs on the fleet.
Musk has made a different case in public. During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, he said the company can’t afford robotaxis stranded in what he called “Bermuda Triangles of lack of cellular connectivity,” and he separately claimed on X that Starlink will eventually reach every Tesla built, calling it the only way to deliver high bandwidth to billions of vehicles. He has also pitched the antenna as an entertainment upgrade, telling riders they would be able to stream 4K video or play games during a trip.
The rollout has moved fast since. Robotaxi service opened to the public in Austin on September 3, and Cybercabs had already been spotted with Starlink hardware in Houston and near Miami International Airport in the weeks before Tuesday’s factory footage showed the module shipping at volume rather than on scattered test units. Whether the satellite link earns its keep is still an open question. Tesla’s unsupervised service currently runs in dense metro geofences in Texas and Florida, markets where cellular coverage is already strong, which is not where the rural dead zones Musk describes tend to show up.
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