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A couple of weeks ago, IONITY revealed their new “Halo” charger rated at 350 kW that’s supposed to charge EVs 220 miles in ten minutes at some point in the future. It sounds pretty great on the outset, and when claims of “more”, “faster”, and “better” are rewarded with headlines, there’s no wonder that this type of tech is being produced well before any electric cars can actually utilize it. Three cheers for progress, yeah?
I’m not so sure.
While I understand the push to make EV charging faster so drivers can have a one-to-one trade off with their gasoline fill up experience, is that what’s going to be in demand as battery-powered transportation takes off? There’s also the question of whether battery health is going to take a huge dive with that sort of charging. I’m probably a bit biased towards Elon Musk’s opinion on such things (Tesla is leading the battery revolution, after all), so when he says 350 kW is a battery killer, I believe him. Will the tech catch up? I don’t know. But, I’m more questioning whether it needs to.
There are some considerable differences and advantages that electric cars have over ICE cars, and I don’t just mean in the emissions sense. With an ICE vehicle, it’s not (realistically) possible to have a nozzle attached to your gas tank in your garage overnight while you sleep, enabling you to wake up to a full tank each morning. You can’t do that while you’re at work, either, nor while running errands. Swap “nozzle” for a charging cable and you can with an EV, though. I really think this is going to be the biggest distinction in our ICE-driven world today and the battery-driven one in the future. Fast charging is great while you need it, but someday we won’t need it. Will we ever need “Halo” charging?
There’s still some time yet before EV chargers are as ubiquitous as wall chargers (and I guess technically those can be EV chargers, too), but hey – if airports and coffee bars can finally catch up to laptop and smartphone needs (plugs everywhere!), so can entities with parking lots. Not to mention, all that happened as a team effort by the tech companies and the plug-providing businesses: Better batteries plus better access to electricity equals electronic happiness (and expansion) for the consumer.
I know there was a period of time when longer cables were phone companies’ answer to portable phone conversations before cordless phones came along, which I admittedly only know because I like classic movies and TV shows. To me, this is a bit of a metaphor for what’s going on with EV charging. “Halo” type chargers are kind of the equivalent to longer telephone cords, and history shows that more of one thing isn’t always better.
The cordless phones are kind of a good metaphor, too. I remember (first hand) how long it took before static issues were eliminated. “Hold on, let me switch to the other phone because I’m too far from the base,” was a frequent conversation comment, and then multi-base systems were offered to solve that one, too. I see the static as the issue of long charging times and the phone base in every room as the faster and faster chargers. We’ve kind of foregone home phones altogether now thanks to cell phones, but to me that’s kind of like imagining an EV plug in every parking spot regardless of whether you’re a homeowner or a renter or a parking garage frequenter.
Once upon a time, cell phone batteries were huge, heavy, and held very little charge. We still complain about them since there are more and more power-hungry features added, but do we opt for a rotary phone over the issue? Nah. We keep chargers in our cars, in the wall at work, in our bags, and so forth. I think ultimately we’ll go in that direction with EVs rather than the hypercharger one, and it will change the landscape. Literally.
Lifestyle
Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory
Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.
Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.
The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.
Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory
Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.
Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says he knows how to save Earth for a billion years
Elon Musk says sentient AI satellites launched from the Moon could keep Earth livable forever.
Elon Musk spent part of his weekend describing a plan to keep the planet livable for roughly a billion years, and it starts with satellites that can think for themselves.
In a post on X, Musk argued that swapping fossil fuels for solar and wind power will not be enough to protect humanity from what he called extremely severe extinction events, the kind that occur roughly every 100 million years. His fix is what he called sentient satellites, or solar-powered satellites, controlled by AI, that would sit in a fixed spot between Earth and the Sun after being launched off the Moon using a giant electromagnetic catapult instead of rockets.
The satellites’ onboard AI would make continuous, small adjustments rather than waiting on human instructions. The mass driver is Musk’s proposed way of getting the raw material there cheaply by using an electromagnetic launch track built on the Moon, where lower gravity and no atmosphere make it far easier to fling cargo into space than it is from Earth.
But we do need to act much faster than that if people still want to live where the beach is today. We have about 50 years or so to take action, which should be more than enough time for the space satellites to solve any heating problems. https://t.co/xhrVQALwQw
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
Musk shared a Grok generated estimate suggesting roughly 5 percent of Florida’s land, or about 1.68 million acres, could face regular flooding by 2070 under a high sea level rise scenario, and said humanity has about 50 years to act before coastal living looks very different than it does today.
This is not the first time Musk has floated the idea. He raised a similar concept in November, describing a solar powered AI satellite constellation that could make tiny adjustments to incoming sunlight to fine tune Earth’s temperature. Musk has also tied planetary risk to his broader vision at SpaceX, where his compensation package is explicitly linked to establishing a self-sustaining Mars colony, one he has described as an insurance policy against the kind of extinction event he referenced this weekend, and where he has said humans could set foot within five to seven years.
A former Vancouver police sergeant with ALS accounts his journey to become a patient for Elon Musk’s Neuralink wireless brain-computer interface technology.
“I’m texting you from my brain right now.” That was the first message Lee Marten sent after waking up from Neuralink surgery, five hours and one migraine after dozens of threads were stitched into his motor cortex.
Marten, a former Vancouver police sergeant, is one of the first Canadian ALS patients to receive Neuralink’s N1 brain implant, and the 26th recipient overall. He tells his story in a first-person account published by Maclean’s.
Marten recounts how he was a healthy, athletic Vancouver police sergeant until April 2022 when symptoms of muscle twitching and balance loss, were followed by a bad fall that broke his leg. He would eventually be diagnosed with ALS in early 2025 at the age of 47. ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that progressively destroys the motor neurons controlling voluntary muscle movement, eventually taking away a patient’s ability to walk, speak, swallow and breathe. There’s no cure, and most patients live two to five years after diagnosis.
He describes the devastation of the diagnosis and how he began preparing for it while connecting with other young ALS patients through a WhatsApp group called Young Guns. Through that group he learned about a Neuralink clinical trial at Toronto Western Hospital and, after a roughly seven-month vetting process (physical assessments, psychiatric evaluation, a final interview with the Neuralink team), was accepted this past April as the trial’s 26th recipient and the first Canadian ALS patient to get the N1 implant. He recounts the May surgery in detail, including the robotic system that stitched 64 threads into his brain, and describes the app, Link, translating his neural signals into cursor control, which he was using within hours of waking up.
Marten walks through what daily use looks like, including weekly “brain training” exercises, a real-time neural-activity display, charging the implant via a beanie-mounted MagSafe charger, and using the implant for emailing, texting, social media, and gaming via a “Magic Box” that connects it to other devices. He also gives brief context on brain-computer interface history and quite candid about Musk, calling him “divisive” but saying he found him “easy to admire.
The piece closes on a heavier note, with Marten seeking to pursue medical assistance in dying as his symptoms progressed, noting that he’ll be able to communicate his final words to his family through Neuralink rather than facing a silent decline. He expresses hope the data from his case will help future ALS patients, even without a cure in his own lifetime.
Tesla Cybercab launch catches NHTSA’s attention who wants to know more
Tesla Cybercab is coming to Asia this month as US service officially begins
