Lifestyle
Why electric vehicles will continue to dominate Pikes Peak after record-shattering run
The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb happens every June in Colorado, sending cars from the base of Pikes Peak up to its top in an arduous climb to a 14,000 feet elevation. The speeds gained are not spectacular by today’s racing standards, but the climb itself is a mixture of brute power and endurance like no other race in the world.
Climbing Pikes Peak even on a normal day is not easily done. Most production vehicles will struggle to get to the summit and many will fail to do so. That’s under standard driving conditions on what is now a fully-paved roadway. The reasons for this are many, but boil down to altitude, the uphill grade, and the huge number of curves in the 12.42-mile road into the clouds.
This year, the Pikes Peak IHC record was blasted through by an electric car. Not for the first time, but so definitively that it’s considered a huge milestone. The car was a Volkswagen purpose-built design whose name specifies what it’s for: the I.D. R Pikes Peak. Meant to showcase the electrification efforts of VW’s new I.D. brand, the car was built specifically to make the Pikes Peak hill climb as quickly as possible. The engineering behind the car is amazing.
Before we talk about that, though, an understanding of what’s at stake at Pikes Peak and how difficult this race really is should be had.
About the Hill Climb
The Pikes Peak International Hill Climb has been the go-to endurance race for high-altitude automotive for over a century. As the second-oldest race in the United States, the Pikes Peak IHC starts at mile marker 7 on the Pikes Peak Highway and runs right up to the top of the roadway’s end 12.42 miles up. There are 156 turns going up the mountain and driver and vehicle gain nearly 5,000 feet in altitude during the climb. The highest point in the race reaches into the sky to over 14,000 feet above sea level.
This amount of climb at that altitude poses significant challenges for race teams. The thin air means less oxygen for driver and machine, sapping performance considerably. With combustion engines, it means less oxygen for the combustion process. With electrics, it often means less cooling for the batteries and components. Most performance electric vehicles can use significant amounts of energy cooling batteries, which heat up quickly during high-performance driving. Components like electric motors and controllers can similarly have performance drain from heat.
Thus taking a Tesla Model X P100D to Pikes Peak, for example, might be a walk in the park under normal driving conditions, suffering nothing more than a significantly lowered range due to the amount of hill climbing involved. Yet trying to race that X up to the Peak will result in the vehicle overheating and entering limp mode early in the run.
Since 2011 when the Pikes Peak Highway was completely paved, most vehicles, whether electric or not, have been able to make the climb under normal conditions if driven leisurely.
Why Electrics Dominate Pikes Peak
The roadblocks for an EV climbing Pikes Peak versus a combustion-powered vehicle in the same race, are far fewer. With the problems of weight versus range having been conquered for some time, the issue of power delivery versus thermal management is the focus.
One of the first electric vehicles to make headlines for its Pikes Peak International Hill Climb run was the Drive eO PP03. Its race time, an impressive 9 minutes, 7.22 seconds, however, was not the reason it was noticed. It was noticed because it was an electric car piloted by rally champion and well-known Pikes Peak racer Rhys Millen. And the PP03 beat the expected EV winner, Nobuhiro Tajima, by over 20 seconds.
Since then, an EV has made headlines in every Pikes Peak race. None, until this year, have beaten the 2013 record set by Sebastian Loeb in a specially-modified Peugeot 208. That record, at 8 minutes and 57 seconds, was compared to how long it takes to fly a helicopter, vertically, from the base to the summit.
That record is no more. Thanks to Volkswagen.
The Volkswagen I.D. R Pikes Peak
This specially-built racer was designed, engineered, tested, and raced in only eight months from start to finish. The car set a Pikes Peak Challenge time of just 7 minutes, 57.148 seconds and its engineers say that if conditions had been perfect on race day, it could have made it even faster. Driver Romain Dumas agreed with that assessment. He also said that the race to the summit is far tougher than an entire 24 Hours of Le Mans run.
The secret is in the battery balance of size, weight, and power delivery. There are two battery packs, each running alongside the driver at the center of the chassis. Each pack powers an electric motor. The entire vehicle weighs under 2,500 pounds and produces 670 horsepower of output. It’s 0-60 mph time is 2.2 seconds, faster than a Formula 1 car, and it can sustain that kind of power output for the duration of its charge. Without becoming crippled by heat.
Rather than add weight- and power-expensive cooling, Volkswagen chose to leave the batteries without thermal management. Instead, airflow around and through the car is critical to its success. The bodywork of the I.D. R Pikes Peak is designed in a way similar to Sprint and Formula race cars, aimed towards managing airflow carefully in order to maximize performance capability. Where a combustion-powered car would direct airflow into the engine through ducting and around the engine for cooling, the I.D. R instead focuses airflow around the batteries and components for maximum cooling (even at thin-air altitudes). It also maximizes airflow around the wheels, as per a Formula car, to maximize downward thrust and improve traction for both straightaways and corners.
This was coupled with a design made specifically for the Pikes Peak climb. The course is just over 12 miles long, so the batteries were sized and formulated to give enough power to run full-throttle for about 13 miles. Cell chemistry is designed to store maximum power and then deliver it at high volume for a sustained amount of time. Unlike production car batteries, of course, VW’s batteries in the I.D. R Pikes Peak don’t have to meet production-level warranty requirements or cycle lifespans.
By perfectly balancing the car’s aerodynamics, cooling flow, battery size, weight distribution, and power delivery, the VW team was able to shatter the previous record for the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb. It’s likely that this record will remain for some time.
Going forward, it’s clear that the advantages electric vehicles have in a race like the Pikes Peak IHC are many and most of the roadblocks towards keeping them out of the running are now surmounted. Combustion engines may continue to win this particular race, on occasion, but it’s very unlikely that they’ll dominate from here on out. For perspective, Rhys Millen, who previously won the EV record, was driving a Bentley SUV with a 12-cylinder engine and took almost 11 minutes to finish the race.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0c3ndL0mSAQ
Investor's Corner
Tesla Robotaxi gets a massive upgrade in Nevada
Nevada regulators just approved a massive expansion of Tesla’s robotaxi fleet across the entire county.
Tesla’s robotaxi footprint in Nevada just grew by roughly 500 times in a single regulatory vote.
The Nevada Transportation Authority approved Tesla’s full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit on Thursday, clearing the way for the company to deploy up to 5,000 driverless vehicles across Clark County over the next 12 months. The decision came during a four hour general session meeting that Tesla investor Sawyer Merritt watched live and reported on X, noting the vote replaces the interim order that had limited Tesla to just 10 robotaxis on a narrow stretch of the Las Vegas Strip.
EXCLUSIVE: Tesla has just officially received approval for its full Autonomous Vehicle Network Company permit in Nevada, clearing the way for Tesla to launch a paid public Robotaxi service in Las Vegas.
This officially allows @Tesla to deploy up to 5,000 robotaxis over the next… pic.twitter.com/DPs5UtUlrE
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) August 20, 2026
That earlier cap, covered here after it surfaced on August 13, came with restrictions that looked stricter than what Tesla runs in Austin: a 45 mph speed ceiling, no airport pickups, and a geofence confined to the Strip corridor. The new approval extends Tesla’s operating authority to all of Clark County, with room to request an even wider geofence across the state.
Tesla representatives at the meeting said they have no intention of putting 5,000 cars on the road right away. Commercial rides are expected to start within 30 days, pending vehicle inspections, insurance filings, and fare approval, the standard steps every robotaxi operator in Nevada has had to clear.
Tesla’s own Robotaxi account replied to the news with a short line, The golden future is upon us.
The timing lines up with Tesla’s broader robotaxi push this month. The company is preparing to open Cybercab rides to the public in Austin as soon as this month, and it opened a sweepstakes for riders to win a seat at the launch event. Tesla filed its original application for a 5,000 vehicle Nevada fleet back in June, a request regulators trimmed to 10 vehicles when they issued the interim order in July. Thursday’s vote effectively grants the number Tesla asked for from the start.
Zoox, the Amazon owned robotaxi operator, has run in Nevada since 2025 and was capped at 100 vehicles before Thursday’s decision. Tesla’s new ceiling puts it well ahead of that comparison on paper, though the company has said its actual fleet size will depend on how quickly FSD v15 rolls out, the software update executives have called the gateway to scaling unsupervised robotaxi operations nationwide.
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
Lifestyle
Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor
Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”
The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”
We took a ride on a robotaxi on the Suntrax course and it successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.
Impressive! https://t.co/FVAkzFLz3r
— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) August 11, 2026
DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.
SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.
Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.
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