Tesla Space #63: Tesla says "Go ahead, cut the cable I dare you"

There’s just ~36 hours left to get the Tesla Space Insider at a 15% launch discount with a very meme price of $69/year, see all the cool new value and stuff you’ll get when you become a member.

By the way, we’ve already increased the number of competition covered across Tesla’s and Muskonomy industries to 59, and we’ve got at least seven more categories to go through. Next up: humanoids. I’m also now listing private companies and their descriptions. The idea is to create a full overview of all industries Tesla and Elon dabbles in, and where do each place among its peers.

The first deep dive newsletter for the members — on Tesla’s place in the Auto Industry and where it places among its competition — is in the works and dropping soon!

I’ll send you a separate email about all this later today as well.
It’ll be the last one on the launch, I promise.

X OF THE WEEK

The crazy part is… the Elon dude now has the receipts too.

xAI launched the Grok 3, and it’s a beast.

Unveiled in a 40-minute live stream last night (tune in through here so you’ll get timestamps too), where Elon shared quite a bit of the journey as well, this AI’s got 10 times the “juice” of Grok 2, allegedly smoking the competition in math, science, and coding.

Elon says: “This might be the last time any AI is better than grok. Grok 3 is scary smart.”

xAI also teased “Deep Search” — a beta tool for tackling tough questions — plus a voice mode coming soon. The web version will introduce multiple AI personalities to match user preferences.

Elon says: “Voice mode is still a little patchy, so probably launches in about a week, but it’s awesome”

Premium Plus X users ( 👋 ) get to play with it already, with a “SuperGrok” tier opening it up wider.

xAI doubled the capacity of their datacenter to 200,000 GPUs in just 92 days.

Elon Musk said tonight that he expects xAI's next training cluster to have 1 million GPUs, worth about $25B-$30B, 5x more than their current 200k GPU cluster.

Reading tip: for a slightly less biased take on Grok 3, here is Karpathy’s observations after getting early access.

We will, of course, also cover the Grok 3 more in-depth in one of our next videos.

By the way per Bloomberg, xAI is discussing another $10 billion raise at $75 billion valuation.

Now, to keep the “X Post of the Week” section true to its funnier self, here’s one interaction from one of my favorite satire sites, and Elon:

TESLA NEWS, GLOBALLY

🇮🇳 🇮🇳 🇮🇳 

Tesla is now officially hiring in India, a sign that it plans to enter the country soon. It has been a looooooong road. For one specific example, Elon said in 2016 that “Tesla will be in India before 3 production starts.”

All this comes just 5 days after Elon met with India Prime Minister Modi in Washington D.C. Tesla has posted 13 job opening on its website ranging from vehicle service, sales and customer support to operations positions.

As you’d expect, India represents a huge new market for Tesla and we’ve reported on the country relaxing its strict regulations on how (or more, where) the vehicles hitting the roads need to be produced to lure more EV makers into the country.

Although India is famous for its 3-wheeler segment (which already has a 57% EV market share by the way), the 4-wheeled passenger car segment also saw new 4,975,167 cars hit the road, of which 99,055 were fully electric (1.99% of all, growing by 19.9% from last year). The EV market is a bit special as the local giant Tata Motors still counted 62.1% of the whole EV sales and MG took up another 21.7%, leaving other automakers just a piece of the <20% share.

How will Tesla do in India? My guess is — very, very well.

Quick bites:

• Hopefully a one-off, a Tesla Service Center in Littleton, Colorado, seems to have mistakenly given out a Tesla that was brought in and ready from service, out as a loaner to other owners before the actual owner got to pick it up.
  
  So his Tesla ended up in a garage about 10 miles from him, without the people driving even knowing. I’ll update what became of this story next week, but it’s likely a curious human error from the Service Center.

• All new Model S AWD buyers in the U.S. now get one paid option for free if you purchase FSD outright for $8,000. The highest-priced option configured — for example the $4.5k Arachnid Wheels or paint colors — will be complimentary. Free lifetime Supercharging still applies.

• Tesla says that the special $249/month lease pricing for the Model 3 in the U.S. will end on March 3rd.

• Here’s why there was no ‘self-dealing’ involved in Tesla’s potential $400M government contract (not even confirmed at all) for Armored Vehicles, despite the media hit-pieces. Elon also said “I’m pretty sure Tesla isn’t getting $400M. No one mentioned it to me, at least.”

• I finally figured out one of the reasons Tesla raised its Canadian prices as well, even when the iZEV incentives ran out and a tariff loomed at the same time.

  The USD - CAD rate change was the key in that decision, as now Rivian announced a similar price increase.

• Tesla has announced a new insurance program in California underwritten by Tesla itself, and switching to it means a 3% discount.

• Must-watch 55-minute video tip: Jay Leno's Garage: Exclusive First Drive of the 2026 Tesla Model Y. He is doing that with Franz and Lars.

  

  
  We also got the reasoning for the turn stalk being put back in the car from Lars:
  “We always say at Tesla, if you aren’t deleting so much that you have to put something back, you haven’t deleted enough. Well, maybe we deleted too much.”

  Of course… Elon responds “Autonomy will make the stalk about as useful as an appendix”

FSD & SOFTWARE

🇲🇽 Tesla's FSD (Supervised) is now available in Mexico!

Also:

If you’ve been reading our newsletters, you already know who Max is, one of the key Supercharging team leaders. But what I find interesting is an increasing amount of these posts about FSD, from various team members, popping up. Are they finally confident enough to recommend it publicly?

Also, in case you’re a former or current poker player like yours truly, you’ll find that FSD praise from Daniel “Kid Poker” Negreanu lands well too.

Currently, for those keeping track, Tesla FSD (Supervised) v13.2.8 has started rolling out to HW4 vehicles and FSD (Supervised) v12.6.4 has started rolling out to HW3 vehicles.

On the Cybercab launch side, both Elon and Franz have confirmed the robotaxi launch in June in Austin:

Elon: “Tesla is still on track to launch autonomous ride-hailing in Austin in June and roll out to many cities in America by the end of this year. The threshold is achieving safety far in excess of the average human driver. Ultimately, autonomous cars will be >1,000% safer than human-driven cars.

Franz, on the Jay Leno episode I shared above: “Starting in June we’ll be having Cybercabs rolling around; That’ll be the technology that feels like the future but is happening today.”

Quick bites:

• The very first lines of robotaxi code have been found in a recent Tesla app update! The first endpoint implemented is a feedback screen that allows users to rate the cleanliness of the vehicle and upload photos.

  The endpoint is named "rides_feedback_upload"

• Reading tip: Here’s a great thread on the Tesla vs Uber on robotaxis debate from a former Tesla leader.

SUPERCHARGING

Finally, a bunch of great Supercharging news to share!

Cable cutting has been a huge nuisance in the EV charging industry recently — across all charging networks. Tesla has felt this too, and of course, it jumped to some innovative solutions. While a bunch of people online are just calling to mildly electrocute anyone cutting the cable, we obviously can’t do that. So,

Tesla has started trialing new anti-theft devices on Supercharger cables in Seattle, WA:

Called DyeDefender, these are stainless steel hose barriers filled with pressurized, blue-staining dye that explodes when someone attempts to cut the cable. Here’s a video of one of them in action.

Max de Zegher commented on this: “Just a trial. We're always exploring options. Supercharger cables will also have "Property of Tesla" engraved from our Buffalo NY factory, so recycling companies shouldn't accept them and notify us. It's a scalable, cost-effective solution that doesn't impact service operations & customer experience.”

Semicharging

What you’re looking at are the plans filed for Tesla's first public Semicharger station, coming soon to South Los Angeles County, California.

Permits were recently filed for the addition of 12 charging stalls for Tesla's Class 8 Semis at 19300 S Hamilton Ave, near the city of Carson.

The site will also feature a 1,600 sqft. amenity building with a lounge, vending machines and restrooms, and parking for staff.

One of the reasons I love being on X (follow us @theteslaspace) is because we can get some valuable nuggets of info like this:

Tesla is aiming to launch its 500kW charging speed Superchargers starting in Q3 2025. These new charging sites will enable Tesla to bring costs down to below $40,000 per charging stall.

To note, $40k/stall or $45k/stall is a wildly lower cost of deploying a DC fast charger compared to the rest of the industry.

Tesla recently installed its 1,000th Supercharger in Sweden:

and if you are wondering, then yes, Tesla still can’t energize over a 100 of the stalls already built due to the unions blocking the grid connections, but they were able to launch this one as a part of expanding an existing site.

I stumbled upon a comment about wireless robotaxi charging from Florian Reiners, the former CEO and co-founder of Wiferion (acquired by Tesla):

MUSKONOMY

Thought I’d kick this section off with a little pic Optimus posted on Valentine’s Day captioned “wish me luck”.

SpaceX & Starlink

Elon: “If all goes well, SpaceX will send Starships to Mars with Optimus robots and Grok (in late 2026).”

T-Mobile launched the Starlink integration beta as a Super Bowl ad. “If you can see the sky, you're connected.”​ The CEO of T-Mobile says: “It’s an absolute game changer for ALL wireless users; We’re still in the early days — I don’t want to overhype the experience during a beta test — but we’re officially putting ‘no bars’ on notice. Dead zones, your days are numbered at the Un-carrier. The beta is now open for absolutely everyone — yes, even Verizon and AT&T customers — to register for free access until July.” You can register for the beta here.

The Boring Company

Announced the Dubai Loop — the initial Dubai Loop pilot will have 11 stations and 17 kilometers of tunnel and will transport over 20,000 passengers per hour, with the goal of ultimately expanding into Dubai Loop, a next generation underground transportation system throughout the Emirate of Dubai

DOGE

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has just announced that they saved an estimated $55 billion so far since the election. The DOGE website now provides a wall of receipts about where all the savings were made and the amounts.

How to know Elon is taking DOGE seriously? News report that Elon Musk has been sleeping on the floor of his government office across from the White House.

…OpenAI?

A group of investors led by Elon Musk have made a $97 billion bid for control of OpenAI. Elon says “It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was.”

While this is certainly a play within Elon’s lawsuit against OpenAI as well, I'm very interested to see how this could possibly play out… and all of shareholders are holding their breath that Elon doesn’t have to sell the stock for the purchase again.