Lifestyle
Top 5 Reasons Why I’m Addicted to Tesla Autopilot
As a lucky owner whose Autopilot software update was received at 4:30am on Day 1 of the roll out, I’ve had as much time as anyone to get to know the system and in a nutshell, I can’t see owning a Tesla without it.
Here are the top 5 reasons why I’m addicted to Autopilot:
1. Feedback
This may go without saying, but the Tesla Autopilot System is excellent at giving you feedback to let you know what’s up. I have a basic cruise control feature in my other car and I never use it. I mean never. Given that I use AP nearly every time I’m in the Tesla, I wondered what I hated about my other car’s cruise control, so I attempted to use it recently. I can get over it not being traffic aware and thus only maintaining one speed. What I can’t get over is that I have no idea how to determine when cruise control is engaged. Sure, the word “cruise” shows up when I press a series of confusing buttons to engage but there’s no feedback to tell me when I cancel. I can jam on the brake or take over the accelerator pedal but I have no idea what effect this has on cruise. I pressed the button labeled ‘cancel’ but was still unsure what was going on.
In the Tesla, there is a simple yet clear gray steering wheel symbol to the right of the speedometer that lets you know when the AutoSteer feature is available, and a TACC indicator on the left. A pleasing bright blue is used throughout the displays. In this case, that steering wheel lights blue when AutoSteer is in use. The TACC symbol is simple yet dynamic; showing you what speed it is set to. Blue also plays a role in showing you how the car is controlling itself while engaged in AP driving. Either the road lines light blue to indicate they are being read, or the car ahead of you on the screen lights blue to indicate it is being followed. Blue = on. Gray = available. Got it? Good.
2. It’s Fun
Two words: Pennsylvania Turnpike. Go ahead and insert the most boring and scene-less drive you regularly make. No matter what occasion, time of day, mood or sleep level, driving between Philly and Wilkes-Barre, PA is an instant bore in my mind but Autopilot makes it so much more enjoyable. Call me crazy but open highway driving, despite being responsible for all parts of it, happens automatically for most of us. Staying between painted lines doesn’t require much thought and isn’t at all stimulating. Now you may think that engaging Autopilot would make you even more bored or tired but I’ve found the opposite to be true. You’ve gone from having a monotonous assembly line job to a supervisory one, which activates different thought processes and keeps you interested. Your eyes and mind focus on the lines, the cars around you, and what your own car is doing (or will do) so the drive suddenly becomes a lot less dreadful. Autopilot is no “one trick pony” though, it’s quite good at having the opposite effect on a driver…
3. Relaxation
It wasn’t until I was on the phone with my husband last week while he was driving (hands free of course) that I realized I’m like a slobbering dog when I hear the Autopilot activation chime. He and I were discussing our rather stressful week and when I heard that chime from him activating AP, I was instantly calmed. I firmly believe the Tesla makes all driving better and more relaxing. Despite neck-snapping acceleration, I love driving this car slow and steady. It cradles me safely and luxuriously, and I rarely want my time with it to end. Even so, the ability to enjoy a drive gets tested in any large city’s rush hour traffic. Enter Autopilot, a glorious companion willing to take over some or all of the driving responsibility. Which leads me to…
4. Customization
I’ve written an entire post on this but it bears repeating. You can choose, with very little effort, how much you want the car to do. This is a function of how smart the car is and how quick at processing inputs it is, as well as how easy those inputs are to execute. A little tug of a wheel, tap on the brake or slap of a stalk and you’re changing what you want to do relating to speed, steering, following distance and more. This also includes the ability to use what I’ve heard referred to as “micro corrections.” That is, you can very slightly adjust steering yourself within the lane and without disengaging AutoSteer, which comes in handy when there are concrete barriers or a lack of shoulder in your lane. Plus it gives the system a hint that you’re holding the steering wheel and paying attention.
5. Improvement
This whole entire system came as an update. One day my Tesla had regular cruise control, the next it was traffic aware and thus in my opinion as a former anti-cruise controller, worth using. A few months later, AP as we now know it rolled out and brought us here. Only, there were a ton of tiny improvements in between. Tesla’s fleet learning is revolutionary. We are all more than happy to provide data by using our cars, and Tesla is more than happy to take that knowledge and give it back to us in the form of sometimes imperceptible refinements.
The things I’ve noticed the most are the smoothness of the car’s speed changes and the car’s preference for staying on the highway rather than following a splitting exit lane. Both of these things left much to be desired in early iterations of both TACC and AP but both have gotten infinitely better. It’s sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you use AP, the more data Tesla gets to make improvements. The more improvements Tesla makes, the more you are willing and wanting to use AP. This is just one of many reasons Tesla’s semi-autonomy is leaps and bound ahead of the competition.
Bonus: Psychedelic Cowbell
For those few Tesla drivers who (begrudgingly so in my case) are considered “millennials,” there is something really magical and even sort of obvious about software updates bringing fun features to the car. After all, we are the generation with smart phones all but surgically implanted in our hands. Forget that though, what I really intend to say is that kids my age grew up playing MarioKart on Nintendo 64 and know the “psychedelic” is really that damned Rainbow Road board that you couldn’t help but fall off of 100 times. Unless you were wimp and chose 50cc engine mode, but friends don’t let friends do such a thing.
For everyone else, it is much more likely you got the “More Cowbell” reference from the Saturday Night Live episode where the phrase was first spoken by Christopher Walken 16 years ago. I doubt many of my fellow 10th grader classmates were watching SNL at that time so I only understood the reference second hand.
All of us can agree though, a company with both the sense of humor and engineering prowess to program and push an Easter egg like this over the air, not 10 days after a random person on Twitter made a joke, is something special. In one single hidden gem like this, there was something for everyone. (And no, the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.)
Elon Musk
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The Boring Company’s Prufrock MB2 is commissioned and ready to mine beneath Nashville’s streets.
The Boring Company’s second tunnel boring machine, Prufrock MB2, is officially ready to dig in Nashville. The company confirmed the news on X, posting: “Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here. Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start? And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August!”
MB2 arrives with meaningful improvements over its predecessor. Lessons learned from the launch and operation of MB1 have already been applied to MB2 to improve efficiency and prepare the machine for launch.
Traditional tunnel boring machines operate in a stop-and-go cycle, digging roughly five feet, halt, erect precast concrete segments to line the tunnel wall, then resume. That repeated interruption is one of the main reasons conventional tunneling is slow and expensive. Prufrock is designed to install the tunnel liner simultaneously with mining, eliminating the need to stop every five feet. The machine also skips the need for excavated launch pits. Prufrock arrives on a truck, tilts down, and launches into the ground within 24 hours. And when the tunnel is complete, it emerges from the ground and drives to its next launch site on a trailer, eliminating the need for expensive cranes or pit excavation. The machine is also fully electric and runs with zero people in the tunnel during normal operations, controlled remotely from a surface operations center.
Prufrock-MB2 is ready to mine in Nashville! MB2 commissioning is complete, including the brief 11 rpm rotation shown here.
Will MB2 catch up to MB1, who had quite the head start?
And Prufrock-MB3 ships in August! pic.twitter.com/TTrMql2aRg
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) June 17, 2026
It won’t be long before we hear of another major update on The Boring Company’s Music City Loop project – a planned underground transit network beneath Nashville that would move passengers in electric vehicles through a series of tunnels at highway speeds, and bypassing surface traffic entirely. Nashville was selected in part because of its strong rock conditions that suits the Prufrock machines well, and relatively less regulatory hurdles.
Progress has been steady on multiple fronts. All 37 permits and approvals required ahead of tunneling have been obtained, out of 45 total. Key wins include a fully executed TDOT tunnel permit authorizing 25 miles of tunnel, unanimous airport authority approval for a Nashville International Airport station, and the city’s first residential station agreement serving downtown tower residents.
With MB1 already tunneling, MB2 now commissioned, and MB3 shipping in August, Nashville is becoming something of a live proving ground for scaled tunnel boring. The broader ambition is not limited to one city. The Boring Company’s stated goal is to make underground transportation a practical alternative to surface roads across major metro areas. Nashville is one of many cities, including a successful Las Vegas tunnel system, where that idea is being put to the test at real speed.
Investor's Corner
Tesla unfolded its first European “folding Supercharger”
Tesla’s folding Supercharger just arrived in Europe and it changes how fast charging expands.
Tesla’s Folding Unit Supercharger has officially landed in Europe, with the company teasing a new installation in its effort for a broader rollout targeting major motorway rest stops across the European continent in Q3 2026. The arrival marks a notable shift in how Tesla is thinking about network expansion, moving from hardware performance alone to engineering the logistics chain itself.
While Tesla did not reveal the exact location for the new folding Supercharger in Europe, the photo shared on X heavily suggests that this maybe somewhere in Norway. Historically, whenever Tesla rolls out an entirely new infrastructure architecture in Europe, whether it was the original Supercharger stalls years ago or these brand-new modular V4 “Folding Units”, Norway is almost always the designated launch pad because of its unmatched EV adoption rate and supportive infrastructure
The Folding Unit, introduced in March 2026, is a factory pre-assembled V4 charging station built on an industrial hinge system mounted to a heavy-duty concrete base. The entire assembly arrives on site ready to unfold and connect. Tesla confirmed the units feature telescopic light poles specifically designed for easy transportation and fast on-site deployment, a detail that signals how carefully the logistics chain has been engineered alongside the hardware itself. The design allows 33% more stalls per delivery truck, cuts installation time roughly in half, and reduces overall deployment costs by more than 20% compared to traditional installations.
Tesla’s newest “Folding V4 Superchargers” are key to its most aggressive expansion yet
Tesla also noted telescopic light poles which provide benefits over traditional Supercharger installations that require fixed-height poles that are awkward to ship, slow to position on site, and often require separate crews and equipment to erect before charging hardware can even be staged. By engineering poles that compress for transit and extend on arrival, Tesla has removed one of the quieter bottlenecks in the physical deployment process. Every hour saved on a light pole installation is an hour redirected toward getting stalls energized. At scale, across dozens of new sites per quarter, those hours add up to a meaningful acceleration in how quickly a location goes from approved permit to serving its first customer.
Each Folding Unit pairs a single V4 power cabinet with eight charging posts. The V4 cabinet delivers up to 500 kW per stall for passenger vehicles and up to 1.2 MW for the Tesla Semi, supporting twice the stalls per cabinet at three times the power density of its predecessor. Longer cables make every new station immediately usable by non-Tesla vehicles, a priority as Tesla continues opening its network to Ford, GM, Rivian, Hyundai, Stellantis, and others.
As Teslarati reported when the Folding Unit was first unveiled, Tesla’s Gigafactory New York produced its final V3 Supercharger cabinet in March 2026 after more than seven years and 15,000 units, completing a full pivot to V4 production. The European arrival of the folding design is the next chapter in that transition.
Faster and cheaper deployment means Tesla can justify building in markets and corridors that were previously too expensive to serve, filling the coverage gaps that have slowed EV adoption outside major urban centers.
First Folding Unit Superchargers in Europe 🇪🇺 https://t.co/KNfYWJukkL pic.twitter.com/YR1udIpH1i
— Tesla Charging (@TeslaCharging) June 10, 2026
Elon Musk
SpaceXAI just launched into your kitchen with their new app
SpaceXAI just powered its first consumer app and it predicts what you want to buy.
SpaceXAI just made its first move into consumer AI, and it involves your grocery cart. On June 3, 2026, Gopuff and SpaceXAI announced the launch of Go, a Grok-powered shopping assistant built directly into the Gopuff app that predicts what you need before you even start searching for it.
Gopuff is an instant delivery platform that operates more than 400 micro-fulfillment centers across the U.S., delivering everyday essentials, snacks, drinks, and household items in as little as 15 minutes. It is not a restaurant delivery app or a marketplace. It owns its inventory, controls its warehouses, and handles its own logistics, which means it has built one of the most detailed consumer behavior datasets in retail over its 13-year history.
Go combines SpaceXAI’s advanced reasoning, voice, and image generation models with Gopuff’s dataset of hundreds of millions of orders and real-time cultural signals from X to prepare a suggested cart the moment a customer opens the app. It learns each shopper’s habits and automatically builds a personalized cart based on time of day, location, order history, and real-time indicators. Returning customers can check out with a single tap.
Rather than searching for specific items, users can describe a situation like a game-day party or the desire for a healthy breakfast and Go will assemble a cart automatically. It can also predict when shoppers are running low on items like coffee or paper towels and have them packed and delivered in under 15 minutes. Grok voice integration lets users talk to the app in plain conversational language and check out completely hands-free.
Gopuff co-founder and co-CEO Yakir Gola said: “Today, we believe the greatest friction left in commerce is not delivery or instantaneous access to the essentials customers need. It’s the moment before: the thinking, the deciding, the remembering. We’re combining Gopuff’s demand intelligence with xAI’s frontier reasoning to create an everyday shopping experience that feels like a true extension of you.”
Why SpaceX just made a $60 billion bet on AI coding ahead of historic IPO
The timing carries context beyond the product launch. SpaceXAI was formed after SpaceX completed an all-stock merger with Elon Musk’s xAI earlier this year, folding one of the most advanced AI labs in the world into the same corporate structure as the company preparing what could be the largest IPO in history. SpaceXAI is dipping into consumer-focused AI just as it prepares for its public debut, and while Musk has openly discussed building an everything app, this launch uses Grok to power another company’s product rather than launching a standalone consumer platform. Every consumer-facing deployment of Grok ahead of the IPO roadshow adds tangible evidence that SpaceXAI is not just an infrastructure play but a direct competitor in the AI application layer where OpenAI and Google are already fighting for dominance.
![Tesla Autopilot Version 7.0 Dashboard Display [Source: Tesla Motors]](http://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Tesla-Version-7-Autopilot-Dash-1024x384.jpg)

