Tesla’s new futuristic diner promises food and fast charging. For nearby residents, it’s a neon nightmare that never sleeps.
Robot cars, human-size problems
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Robotaxis are silently (and sometimes awkwardly) roaming around Phoenix, San Francisco, Austin and wherever else humans dare let cars do improv in traffic. Waymo, Tesla and soon Amazon want you to ghost your Uber driver and jump headfirst into a future with no one behind the wheel.
Tempting? Sure. But should you? Well…
🧠 Waymo: sensor show-off
Waymo is Google’s souped-up baby Jaguar. And it’s not just cute. It’s packing serious hardware: GPS, radar, lidar and 29 cameras. You’d think it could see into next Tuesday.
In Phoenix, you can summon one with no driver. The doors unlock, you hop in, and off you go. Well, mostly.
Regulators have flagged 22 “incidents” ranging from boo-boos with barriers to cases of being directionally defeated by construction cones. One time, two women were straight-up trapped inside a car when the doors wouldn’t open. (Waymo Escape Room: now accepting reservations.)
Let’s not forget the recall: More than 1,200 vehicles were pulled after collisions with stationary objects.
Still, here’s the twist: Waymo’s crash rate is up to 80% lower than human drivers when it comes to injury-causing accidents. It’s safer, just not graceful. Think: clumsy nurse with steady hands.
⚡ Tesla: risk-taker
Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” robotaxis skip the radar, skip the lidar and go camera-only. It’s kind of like teaching your car to drive by binge-watching dashcam videos.
In Austin, they’re testing 10 driverless Teslas with remote watchers instead of safety drivers. They need to. There’s a video of one in Austin having a brain-fart moment when seeing cops on the side of the road.
FSD recently failed to stop for a child-size dummy next to a school bus … eight times. One drove onto train tracks. And yes, there’s at least one fatal pedestrian crash under federal investigation. I love innovation, but I’m not about to trust my life to a car that still needs a hall monitor.
🥕 Musk’s trillion-dollar carrot: Tesla’s board dangled a “bribe Dad to stay home” pay package that could make Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, but only if Tesla’s value jumps from $1.1T to a wild $8.5T. If it works, he pockets 423M shares worth $143B today, plus keeps steering Tesla into robotaxis and humanoid robots.
More than 80%
That was Tesla’s share of the U.S. EV market back in the day. They’re down to just 38% of sales, the lowest since 2017. Why? While other automakers pump out shiny new EVs, Tesla’s busy dreaming about robotaxis and humanoid robots. Their last “new” model was the Cybertruck in 2023.
⚡ Classic cars get plugged in: Imagine your busted Land Rover or the Ferrari 308 from Magnum, P.I., now whisper-quiet as a Tesla. U.K.’s Electric Classic Cars has converted 100+ classics since 2015, swapping gas engines for battery packs without chopping up the vintage shells. Conversions start around $57K, but wild custom builds climb past $190K. I don’t know, I love the roar of my ’67 Corvette that was actually in the movie Con Air.
👨🏻⚖️ Tesla said, “No data here” … Oopsie: Tesla told a jury there was absolutely no data showing what happened in a 2019 Autopilot crash that killed 22-year-old Naibel Benavides Leon and left her boyfriend, Dillon Angulo, seriously injured. Then a hacker in a Starbucks found the so-called “missing” evidence, and it was game over. The jury hit Tesla with a $243 million verdict.
⚙️ Uninsurable metal box: Tesla’s stainless steel Cybertruck is apparently too weird to insure. Geico and Hanover are pulling out, citing plummeting sales (just 4,306 sold last quarter) and high repair costs. The truck’s low production and high drama have made it a financial Bermuda Triangle.
$30,000
Ford’s entry ticket to the electric pickup game. That’s the starting price for its new midsize EV truck, about the same as a Toyota RAV4 but with more space, a frunk and zero trips to the gas pump. The plan? Make owning one cheaper over five years than driving a used Tesla Model Y.
Tesla pulls the plug: If this is true, it’s crazy. Rapper Big Huey says his Cybertruck got remotely shut off after he released his song “Cybertruck.” He even claims Tesla mailed him a cease-and-desist. That’s one way to take “don’t kill my vibe” very literally. Next up: Spotify turns off your fridge for skipping Ed Sheeran too much.
2
That’s how many Cybertrucks the U.S. Air Force is buying just to blow up. They’re headed to White Sands Missile Range, where the military wants to test how Tesla’s angular apocalypse-mobile holds up to precision-guided munitions.
$243 million
What a jury told Tesla to cough up over a fatal Autopilot crash. That includes $200M in punitive damages, aka “don’t do that again” money. The crash killed a young woman and injured her boyfriend. Autopilot was engaged, the driver was distracted, and the jury decided both were to blame, not equally.
Tunnel vision: The Musk Boring Company is planning a 10-mile loop in Nashville, linking downtown to the airport. It’s privately funded, Tesla-filled (of course) and could launch by 2026 if no one panics about excavation under Music City.
$16.5 billion
That’s how much Tesla’s spending on AI chips from Samsung, and that’s just the appetizer. Interestingly, not buying ’em from Nvidia. Elon Musk says it’s a “baseline,” which in Musk-speak usually means “buckle up.” The AI6 chips will be homegrown in Texas, giving “Made in America” a futuristic glow-up.
Don’t trust Tesla Autopilot to drive for you
A recent lawsuit reveals the ugly truth: Autopilot can ignore stop signs, blow through intersections and fail to brake.
🛻 I think he might be right: Waze’s cofounder thinks Gen Beta (those born from 2025 to around 2039) won’t ever touch a steering wheel. With Tesla and Waymo pushing robotaxis, Uri Levine says the future is all self-driving, and maybe mobile shoe stores. So yeah, traffic might just be a bunch of vans selling Crocs.
🚘 What a bunch of Grok: Tesla just shoved its chaotic AI chatbot, Grok, into new cars, and it’s coming for older ones, too. It won’t drive or blast AC (yet), but it will banter, joke, and yes, there’s an “Unhinged” mode. You need Wi-Fi or a Premium plan to chat, but no account required.
“Full self-driving” debunked: A Tesla owner just got his $10K back after proving “Full Self-Driving” isn’t even close. The car never qualified for FSD beta, and turns out the hardware can’t handle autonomy anyway. It’s “Full Self-Driving” the way LaCroix is “juice.”
Tesla’s ghost delivery: This is something. Tesla just delivered a car from its factory to a customer with zero humans inside, not even a remote operator. The car just snuck home like a teenager after curfew. Elon says it’s the first true hands-off highway drive. I wonder: If you miss a few car payments, will it also drive itself back to the dealer?
$4.20 flat fee
What it costs to ride Tesla’s new robotaxi in Austin, Texas. Right now, about 10 self-driving Model Ys are on the road, with a Tesla employee riding shotgun just in case. Elon says 1,000 more are coming in the next few months, with San Francisco and LA up next (paywall link). Good luck, traffic.
Reason #452 why I sold my Tesla: FSD was a pile of poopy hype. In repeated trials, Tesla’s Full Self-Driving feature rolled past stop signs and mowed down child-size mannequins like a GTA side quest. Elon says safety is top priority, which is reassuring to the mannequins’ plastic parents.