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What Goes Into a Tesla Model S Annual Service?
I’m still shy of the 12 month mark on owning my Model S, but I just had my first annual service and wanted to share my thoughts and experience on Tesla’s annual service.
Frequency of Service
Tesla recommends that you have your Model S serviced every 12,500 miles or every 12 months, whichever comes first. This has always been problematic for me since I drive 30,000 miles a year. So by their rules I’d be getting an “annual” service every 5 months.
When I explained this to my Tesla rep during delivery of my Model S, they had recommended that I perform the service at 24,000 miles which seemed very arbitrary to me, but that’s what I did.
At 24,000 miles (less than 10 months into ownership) I called for an Annual Service appointment. The service person I spoke to was shocked I hadn’t had my car serviced yet with all those miles and I explained that I had been following their recommendation. My appointment was booked 3 weeks out. It wasn’t urgent so timing wasn’t a big deal, but it did mean that I would be going in for my first service at 25,500 miles.
When should I take my Model S in?
I took to the TMC forum and asked other owners what their Tesla annual service experience was like. Universally, owners are treating the annual service as just that, an annual service regardless of miles and type of service needed. However similar to my experience, some owners are receiving mixed guidance from Tesla on when the annual service should really take place.
This gets even more confusing when it comes to those with the pre-paid service plan. I did an analysis of Tesla’s pre-paid service plan when purchasing the car and realized that it just wasn’t for me
One Model S owner who goes by the handle of AmpedRealtor received the following email from Jerome Guillen, former VP, Worldwide sales and service (he just changed roles):
Dear Mr. [AmpedRealtor]:
Any customer who has paid for a 4-year service plan is entitled to 4 “annual service” visits. The customer can elect to bring the car whenever they desire: we recommend every year or every 12,500 miles (whichever comes first), but the customer are free to do whatever they essentially desire. They can bring the car every 18 months or every 6 months. In the end, they will receive the 4 “annual service” they have paid for. I hope this clarifies the situation.
Many thanks for your continued support. Best regards,
Jerome Guillen | VP, WW sales and service
While thats a nice email and statement, it isn’t what the contract says when you sign up for the pre-paid plan. So while Elon, Jerome, and others have stated other things its hard to commit to a contract that clearly states something different and then expect otherwise.
Ultimately, Tesla needs to get their act together on what an Annual Service really entails and make sure the paperwork matches the intent.
What Goes Into the Tesla Annual Service?
The Annual Service price (if not pre-paid) is $600. Its an all-day affair and usually involves you dropping off your car and getting a loaner.
In many areas, Tesla offers a valet service (for free) where they’ll pick up your car and drop off a loaner, but they’ve started clamping down on that service. Nowadays it seems that they only want to do the valet service if you’re within 10 miles of the Tesla Service Center. I wasn’t offered valet service (I work 14 miles from the service center) and dropped my car off myself which wasn’t a big deal — I always love seeing all the Tesla’s on their lot.
The actual annual service was described as follows on my invoice:
They basically go over the car and check everything out. Along the way they’ll also perform any other needed updates where needed.
There was a service bulletin:
Bulletin: Model S | SB-14-17-002 | Corrosion on 12V Positive Jump Post
And I had some corrosion so they replaced the parts that were of concern.
They also did more than a normal “Annual” service since I was at twice the mileage for the annual and evidently they have different types of service at different mileages. This one they called:
24 Month/25000 Mile/40000 km Service (with Coil Suspension)
For that part of the service they removed, cleaned and lubricated front and rear brake pads and performed an alignment with some minor adjustments.
So while the service is annual, they do different things based on the mileage on the car again somewhat contradicting ideas of coming in whenever you want or only once a year regardless of mileage.
Extra Items
I generally have a list of less urgent items that I want addressed each time I go into the service center. I had two open issues this time as follows:
- One of my Tesla UMCs was not working.
- My right front tire was somehow rubbing when the wheel was at full turn and at low speeds (usually reversing into a spot).
The UMC (my original one that came with the car) was faulty and they replaced it for free after testing it themselves. I’m a little concerned it didn’t even last a year before failing but at least it was covered by the warranty. Fortunately when it failed I had a spare and had started using that after several bad charges with the original UMC.
To address the rubbing noises coming from the right front tire, Tesla mostly blamed the noise on my aftermarket Tsportsline wheels and Nokian tires but was able to address it with a wheel alignment. I don’t really buy that the aftermarket parts were the issue given there’s a forum discussion going on with owners with the exact same issue on the same front right wheel. But whatever they tweaked, it is much better now. I think their design tolerances in the wheel well are too tight.
Oddly they had an item on the service sheet as a customer complaint from me that I didn’t bring up when making the appointment:
Concern: Customer states cruise control is not working normally.
This was actually derived from an email to ownership a few months before the service about the problems around limited regeneration in the cold. It wasn’t a complaint about the car as it was working as designed, it was a suggestion that they may want to review how things worked in that area as I thought there was a safety issue.
Tesla collects all concerns / complaints that you email them with and will include it into your service checklist.
Getting a Loaner
Any service event (planned or unplanned) is an opportunity to experience a Model S with a different set of configurations. While I was hoping for a P85D, I ended up with a beautiful blue P85+.
While the extra performance was nice, I wasn’t blown away by it since I had a lot more trouble with keeping the wheels from spinning. With my S85 I really have to work at losing traction and the traction control does a great job. With the P85+ (it had winter tires on too, Sottozero) the tires spun a lot and I didn’t like the experience — the power was too much for either the tires or the traction control or both.
The other thing the car had that was new for me was the Alcantara headliner. I really liked the look of it and would have to think hard on that option next time. I’d want to hear about maintenance/cleaning experiences first though.
Summary
My first paid Tesla service appointment in over 25,000 miles cost a total of $600 and was overall a good experience. I felt that it was good value for the amount of work Tesla did on the car. Tesla did everything I expected (and more) and returned my car cleaner inside and out than it has been in many months of driving through a harsh New England winter.
Granted it got dirty before I even reached home but it was still great to see how beautiful the car looked when clean. I’m ready for spring.
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SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
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SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
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Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
News
Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity
Credit: SpaceX![]()
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.




