Tesla Space #45: ⚡ 10 days to 10/10

X POST OF THE WEEK

a real bullseye meme game here by Tesla’s @Cybertruck account.

They are, of course, referring to Cybertruck finally learning receiving an over-the-air update granting it FSD capabilities. It also includes End to End Highway Stack.

We’ll show you some videos of this in action in our FSD section.

TESLA, GLOBALLY

10 days until the 10/10 robotaxi event. Who’s excited?

Tesla sent out the invites for the shareholder raffle and some influencers. They call the event “We, Robot”.

I of course had my tinfoil hat ready to go to try and find out any teasers the image would hold. It seems I was the first to recognize this similarity on the robotaxi ride-hailing app mockup we saw

I of course also played around with the image itself changing contrast, etc to find out there’s a streetlight hidden in the image, and the inner circles seem like a robotaxi wheel…

Oh boy I wish I’d have an invite to the event — I’d jump on a plane today to be there. Wild thing is that I even had a chance to attend as +1, but the original ticket holder can’t come… which means they won’t let me in. Oh well 🤷 

Tesla also hosted a new referral contest for a chance of attending the robotaxi event — every two complete referrals after Aug 24th to Oct 3rd will get one entry. US only.

🇸🇪 Tesla now sells more EVs in Sweden than all of the VW Group brands combined, taking 26% of the EV market share. Naturally, it also beats the local Volvo/Geely in third spot.

All this is even more remarkable considering the Swedish unions (not Tesla employees) are still on strike against Tesla and even the license plates and mail are blocked from arriving at the Tesla factory.

This has led to Tesla hand-writing the license plate numbers — approved to do so by the local police — and the Tesla owners now get the real license plates in the mailbox at home.

Milestone: Tesla exported the 1 millionth car from Giga Shanghai

Quick bites:

• We should get Tesla’s Q3 production and delivery numbers tomorrow.

• Due to an unusually high number of sick days at the Giga Berlin (about 3x rate of industry average apparently at 17% in August), the factory Managing Director André Thierig and Head of Human Resources Erik Demmler visited 30 employees unannounced at home to check.

• Tesla Korea introduced a 0% interest promotion for Q4. So this is the actual answer for all those cryptic image teasers with “0” on socials. There is, of course, a chance there’s more they’ve hinted at…

• 🇵🇭 Tesla has begun building out its first store in the Philippines, after job listings in the country were recently spotted.

• Onvo (the NIO subbrand) currently has 180 store managers in China, 40% of whom are from Tesla. “The salespeople from Tesla are exceptionally good,” they said.

• Tesla Shop: Tesla has just released a 5000mAh Wireless Portable Charger for $95.

• A driving student in Arizona was denied her license after passing the driving test because Tesla has “too many safety features”.

• Looks like the Cybertruck can take sizable hail pretty well, dents only the tonneau a little. Wes comments: “This is what happens when you put the toughness on the outside”

• Watch tip: former Tesla VP of Public Policy, Rohan Patel, in Farzad’s nearly 2h video interview.

• Joke tip: a short video on what everyone invited to the robotaxi event can expect.

• Listen tip: Cybertruck gets a new horn sound in an over-the-air update. It sounds cyber... or more like a robot goose?

WHAT OUR READERS DRIVE

A couple of issues ago, hundreds of you replied to our poll saying you do have a Tesla, and a lot of you own also other EVs. Then, I asked you to send a picture of the EV and its name, and… you delivered, big time!

To be honest, we got so many replies with your car pics (there are 7,000+ readers of this newsletter today) that I have been putting off including them here, because we wouldn’t have any room for the rest of the email.

Yesterday, it dawned on me. Why not start a weekly series and showcase just few at a time? We’ll try it out. Here are the first two of many pics from our readers just like yourself:

#1 Here is Christian’s Model 3 Performance (2021) from 🇩🇪 Germany:

And here’s #2, the 2019 LR Model 3 (left) which Pat traded in for the 2023 LR Model Y (right):

Thanks guys! I love putting these newsletter together even more now.

We’ve got somewhat of a waiting list to go through, but if you haven’t yet, do send a pic of your EV, its name and story as a reply to this newsletter or at [email protected] and we’ll feature you in this spot soon!

FSD, TECH & SOFTWARE

With Tesla launching Cybertruck FSD in the last hour of the month they completed their whole list of September 2024’s roadmap we saw on earlier this month.

Interesting to see if they’ll complete October — which I’d imagine they do considering the robotaxi needs these features anyway. Meanwhile, the FSD release in Europe might be a bit further away than we’d hope — recent DCAS regulation paves way for it to be launched for highways, but not in urban settings.

Now, Ashok Elluswamy says “End-to-end on the highway is first shipping to Cybertrucks. We are close to an early release build for remaining platforms and will release to internal employees in the next week or so.”, and also that ASS, or Actually Smart Summon, is also coming to legacy S/X, in Q4.

FSD 12.5.4.1 is rolling out now. It also includes ASS imporovements like:

• Improved Public/High-Speed Road Aborts

• Improved Blocked Camera Aborts

• Reduced False Positive Collision Mitigation Aborts

• Refined Dumb Summon

• Added Custom/Fart Completion Sounds

Coming soon: HomeLink & myQ garage integration, and Usage without Continuous Press.

Latest FSD & ASS Videos:

• Wholemars’ first test of the end-to-end highway stack for FSD on Cybertruck in this 17-minute video. Others also report that steer-by-wire doesn’t affect the experience.

• Andy Slye surprised his Uber riders by asking and then letting FSD drive their whole route, reactions and everything on this video.

• “FSD 12.5.4 sees the closed road before me”.

• “FSD 12.5.4 reacts to texting driver drifting into our lane before I even realized what was happening.”

• A great 20-minute video of testing ASS with multiple simultaneous viewpoints.

• This guy got police called on him testing ASS: “we got a call about you using a remote control to control your car? Umm…”

Do you remember when I showed you how much attention Cybertruck is getting from the celebrities that own one? Now imagine all this attention directed to them driving with FSD. That’s coming, in front of billions of people now.

Oh and by the way, Tesla just won dismissal of a shareholder lawsuit alleging misleading statements about self-driving capabilities propped up its stock price. “Justice prevails,” comments Elon.

THE MUSKONOMY

“My companies are actively looking for ways to invest in and support Argentina,” says Musk.

SpaceX

Now, Starship Flight 5 is ready to fly — propellant load test and preflight checkouts complete, now waiting for regulatory approval.

SpaceX also set a multi-page letter to Congress about the FAA’s inability to keep pace with the commercial spaceflight industry. Elon said SpaceX will sue FAA for regulatory overreach. Musk also posted one of his longest X posts ever on how this is a fork, maybe the fork, in the road of human destiny.

Watch tip: Here’s about 5 minutes of stunning footage from the Polaris Dawn mission, the five-day mission completed 75 orbits around Earth.

(SpaceX’s) Starlink

United Airlines wishes they could have installed Starlink on all their airplanes sooner. Starlink says they have about 2,500 aircraft under contract now. If this is correct, it’d be around 10% of the global active commercial passenger aircraft fleet.

The airlines that have or are about to install Starlink on its planes include United Airlines, Qatar Airlines, Air France, Hawaiian Airlines, JSX. Air France, for example, also says the new fast internet will be completely free of charge for all travelers.

Here’s how long Starlink’s customer base has taken to grow so far:

1st million customers in 2 years; 2nd million in 9 months; 3rd million in 8 months; 4th million in 4 months.

Starlink’s manufacturing facility in Texas is producing so much Starlink equipment that it will soon be the largest factory for printed circuit boards (PCB) in the US, according to SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell.

Starlink is also used in emergency response in North Carolina on the Hurricane Helene aftermath, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) sent 180 Starlink sets to get coverage up for the area. I expect this will become a ‘norm’ for all disasters very soon.

Neuralink

Neuralink received the Breakthrough Device Designation from the FDA for Blindsight, which will enable even those who have lost both eyes and their optic nerve to see. Elon says:

“Provided the visual cortex is intact, it will even enable those who have been blind from birth to see for the first time.

[…] To set expectations correctly, the vision will be at first be low resolution, like Atari graphics, but eventually it has the potential be better than natural vision and enable you to see in infrared, ultraviolet or even radar wavelengths, like Geordi La Forge.”

The Boring Company

Boring Company shares “Prufrock-4 lighting test inside Boring Factory, with a subtle cameo by Prufrock-5.”

X

X has received money transmission licenses in California and Oklahoma, now has it in 36 states with 14 to go. Once it gets them all, it can launch its own payment service in the US and thus fulfill the next step in what Musk has wanted for X .com since the PayPal / Zip2 days — an everything app with payments embedded.

X also moved out of its (Twitter) headquarters in San Fransisco and established new HQ in Bastrop, Texas, where also Boring Company and SpaceX are present, and it’s <40mi from Austin. It’ll be located in “Hyperloop Plaza” which Musk imagines as a work-live community for his employees.