Lifestyle
Two Years of Blissful Tesla Model S Ownership
It happened in the blink of an eye. December 4th, 2016 came and went unceremoniously. Perhaps it’s the holiday shuffle or the dreary, cold days that took away some of my attention. More likely, it’s that greatness in this case breeds a sort of serene feeling of being content. Two years ago on that date, I took delivery of a shiny, Multicoat Red, Tesla Model S 85.
A lot has changed since then, but all for the better thanks to this amazing car.
Road Trips
I’ve taken a few, and racked up 19 states (plus 1 Canadian Province) and over 40 Supercharger locations. Each trip has somehow been better than the last, and always points toward the one truth: I need to drive to California. Never before would I have even joked about considering such a thing, but the ease and joy of driving a Tesla has made me want it badly.
Mileage
I certainly don’t shy away from driving this car to destinations near and far. The odometer read over 36,000 on our 2nd anniversary and I’m oddly proud of that fact. Doubly true since the car’s daily work commute is fewer than 20 miles per day.
Destination Chargers
Just over a year ago, I approached a restaurant about becoming a destination charger in Wilkes-Barre, PA, which at the time was the one place I had a heck of a time getting to and from due to a lack of Superchargers on the way. Despite no longer being in desperate need of juice while there, since a Supercharger has since been built along the way, I’m elated and somehow feel proud. Little old Wilkes-Barre, PA has not one but two non-hotel destination chargers.
Superchargers
Everywhere I need or want to go to is covered by Tesla charging locations these days. As it turns out, there is one under construction at the very ski area my husband had to take a gasoline car to get to just last winter! Round trip from our home to the mountain isn’t possible. Aside from intentionally visiting that area just to ski, it is also just 24 miles from my in-laws’ home and provides yet another decent charging option for when we visit. Their garage/driveway-less home is not one that would accommodate us installing an outlet, so we used to have to get creative with an extension cord across a sidewalk or borrowing a car to drop ours off at a Level 2 charger overnight.
Service
Tesla has always provided us with remarkable service. We have not yet experienced any major issues, but all minor issues have been taken care of swiftly, politely, and with the use of a loaner car. I recognize that this service may not be feasible in the long run, but I’m very happy to take advantage of it while I still can.
Social
If you told me when we picked up our car in 2014 that I would have chatted with dozens of fellow owners and enthusiasts in real life and online, met up with owners around the country, and spoken to hundreds of people at a local car show, I probably would have rolled my eyes. If you told me I’d be sharing my story on Teslarati and would have attended the unveiling event for the Model 3, I certainly would have told you that you were a few rivets short. The car isn’t just fun to drive; it’s massively fun to talk about.
Cost of ownership
Until last week, not one red cent had been spent on maintaining our car. The cost of electricity has been mostly off set by making a few efficiency adjustments at home, but if I had to estimate a true cost, I’d say we spend $50 per month on powering the car for non-road trip use. Last week, we took the car in for 2 year service. Admittedly, we skipped the first year service, since the car had been checked over twice when we brought it in for minor issues. This service came with a total bill of $742 including sales tax. For that fee, we got piece of mind and a “clean bill of health” so to speak. We know our investment is in good shape, will continue to keep us safe, and should operate for a very long time. For those wondering, it also included plenty of tangible items. They included cleaning and lubricating closures such as moving glass and doors, topping off washer fluid, measurement and rotation of tires, additional air, measurement of brake pad thickness, 4 wheel alignment, new wiper blades, new carbon filter, new key fob batteries, new desiccant bag – subcool condenser, and a quart of brake fluid.
We mentioned having started hearing a bit of a buzz while driving at low speeds, which prompted additional work at no additional cost. Tesla did what appears to be an extremely proactive move in replacing the powertrain and o-rings for the high voltage inverter enclosure.
A little bit of luck also came our way, in that the driver’s door handle apparently gave the service center issue while the car was there. A new assembly was installed and we were none the wiser until seeing our receipt. Our beautiful red car was back in our hands 48 hours later.
I can talk until I’m blue in the face about how great this car is but to me, there is only one true measure of how satisfied someone is with their car and that is whether or not you’d buy another car from the same manufacturer. I undoubtedly will – just the moment I am invited to configure my Model 3.
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.
Lifestyle
Tesla saves its passengers again – This time after a 300-foot cliff fall in Malibu
A Tesla Model 3 fell 300 feet off a Malibu cliff and both passengers survived.
A Tesla Model 3 plunged roughly 300 feet off a cliff on Mulholland Highway in Malibu on Friday morning, May 29, 2026, and both occupants survived. The crash was reported at approximately 7:30 a.m. near the 2500 block of Mulholland Highway, triggering a multi-agency rescue operation involving Malibu Search and Rescue, the Los Angeles County Fire Department, the California Highway Patrol, and McCormick Ambulance.
When first responders arrived, the male driver was outside the vehicle shouting for help while the female passenger remained pinned inside the Tesla. Rescue crews rappelled down the cliffside on ropes to reach the wreckage. A flight medic was lowered by helicopter to begin treating both victims, and the driver was hoisted up to the roadway before crews used the Jaws of Life to free the trapped passenger. Both were airlifted to a local trauma center with moderate injuries despite a remarkable result for a fall that steep.
The outcome is not surprising, considering Model 3 earned an overall 5-star rating from NHTSA in every category and sub-category, and recorded the lowest probability of injury of any car ever evaluated by the U.S. New Car Assessment Program. The absence of a traditional engine in the front of the vehicle creates a longer crumple zone that absorbs impact energy before it reaches occupants, and the battery pack running along the floor gives the car an unusually low center of gravity that reinforces structural rigidity.
This is not the first time a Tesla has kept passengers alive after going off a cliff. A Tesla Model Y carrying a family of four survived a plunge off a cliff at Devil’s Slide near San Francisco in January 2023, with two adults and two children walking away from a 250-foot fall. That incident drew widespread attention to how the structural integrity of Tesla’s electric platform performs in extreme crash scenarios that most vehicles would not survive.
Tesla Model Y driver who drove off cliff with family attempts to avoid criminal conviction