Tesla Space #75: your name on a Supercharger

X OF THE WEEK

$TSLA

… is up +13.60% since our last week’s newsletter (Monday’s close), now at $318.38 per share right as I send you this before the market open. Tesla is now at $997.63B market cap.

There’s a clear reason for that run in the past week. Join the Tesla Space Insider to unlock some more insight inside this very section every week.

TESLA, GLOBALLY

What are these?! Joe Tegtmeyer found some very interesting prototypes on his Monday flyover of Giga Texas:

Tesla account takes the chance to comment with a joke:

Quick takes:

• Tesla got denied the "robotaxi" trademark (although it has another application still under examination so not all seems to be lost). Meanwhile, Tesla has added full functionality code information for Robotaxi in their newest app update, which some guys of course de-compiled to see everything that is prepped. Turns out the robotaxi service will is codenamed Alicorn (which is basically an unicorn with wings).

• Meanwhile, NHTSA safety investigators asked Tesla to answer questions on its plans to launch a paid robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in June, in order to assess how the electric vehicle maker's cars with full self-driving technology will perform in poor weather.

• Meanwhile Elon on FSD & robotaxi in June:

• We heard of some changes coming to how Tesla customer service works, and it’s now here, confirmed by an employee: "Tesla Service’s new AI Agent detects comms delays, monitors sentiment, & auto-escalates to leaders. Starts tomorrow at 10 pilot locations. In 2 weeks, type “Escalate” in ‘message center’ to reach managers. Guardrails in place to prevent abuse."

• Official video from Tesla Asia: Tesla uses some of the successfully treated wastewater from its Giga Shanghai factory for fish farming and flower cultivation.

• Cortex 2.0 is now confirmed — Tesla is building a large facility at Giga Texas to house Cortex 2.0, the second GPU supercomputer cluster installation to train FSD, Optimus etc.

• Tesla now has Cybertruck mobile service vehicles in New England and California.

VEHICLES

Tesla cancels Cybertruck Range Extender

Tesla writes Cybertruck owners that they no longer plan to sell the Range Extender for Cybertruck and will be refunding the deposit in full. The Range Extender was an extra $16,000 battery pack attached to the bed of the Cybertruck which would’ve increased the range to 470 miles, and Cybertruck customers could order it for $2,000 down late last month.

This is the email Tesla sent out to the order holders:

While this definitely an interesting feature to begin with, it is likely very difficult to make it feasable for Tesla itself. The owners who were betting on getting this were willing to sacrifice a large chunk of their bed for example for towing with their Cybertruck over longer range, and might understandably be quite disappointed here.

As for Tesla’s Cybertruck goals, would that mean abandoning longer range Cybertruck altogether or hoping to unlock the longer range with more efficient batteries (4680) and placement?

Meanwhile, most Cybertruck owners just got offered, by Tesla, a ~$1,200 worth of free feature — free FSD Superised access for a one year (usually ~$99/month). Meanwhile Tesla’s message also indicated that the company will be disabling Autosteer for the Cybertruck. FSD Supervised would naturally replace the feature set (and more).

Quick takes:

• Tesla launched the Model Y Long Range RWD in the US; $44,990 ($37,490 including Fed EV credit).

• Tesla has begun reaching out to customers to replace for free the high-voltage battery pack seals in Model S and Model X vehicles manufactured between 2021 and 2022. In particular, this impacts vehicles between January 2021 and September 22, 2022.

• Watch tip: An anti-Elon Musk group drives over Tesla Model 3 with a Sherman tank — but it seems it might've been more of an ad instead, based on how well intact the M3 remained!

• Watch tip: reactions and review of the first Tesla Cybertruck driving in Lagos, Nigeria.

• Watch tip: Braden the Cybertruck farmer uses a winch in the frunk to (slowly) pull out stuck diesel Semi truck.

• US Foods Tesla Semi spotted on video near Giga Nevada.

SUPERCHARGING

Here’s some news broken to the media by yours truly here: Third parties can now purchase Superchargers straight from Tesla and add their logo (or keep the units white-labeled)!

I found this by some images taken of their actual trade show booth from the Power2Drive event that just took place in München, Germany!
"Add Your Logo or Keep Units White Labeled"

We don’t really have the details if Tesla offers its V4 cabinets in the deal as well that would allow for 1,000V output voltage, or are these offered still at the V3 or V3.5 around 500V.

Price? You should contact Tesla for that, but we’re pretty sure we’ll start seeing the rough pricing become well-known around the industry soon enough.

Per one comment from an European charging industry player, it seems to be $180k (or €180k?) for 3x dispenser with 1x CC2 and 380kW power unit. Unconfirmed, though.

Oh boy, it’d be cool to launch some of these with the Tesla Space logo out there in the wild.

Peek inside the Tesla Diner

Tesla Diner is getting closer to completion, and someone was able to go and take a closer peek. We also get the very first peek of the official logo, and some artwork of the Cybertruck inside:

Tesla pilots Supercharging pricing based on how busy the Supercharging station is, instead of just the static estimations of off-peak and on-peak times.

Tesla says you’ll always see the price before your session begins, and prices do not change mid-session. A small-scale pilot is launching at 10 sites and will expand based on feedback and success.

Tesla says that on average for Tesla customers, their Superchargers in Europe and North America are 30% cheaper than other fast-charging options. Here’s the list of the pilot sites

Quick takes:

• Mazda partners with Tesla to use NACS port for its EVs in Japan (second do to that after Sony). For important context, in Japan, around 90% of all 150kW+ chargers are Tesla Superchargers.

• Powerwall provided over 6k hours of collective backup power during the Portugal and Spain outages.

MUSKONOMY

Optimus can dance! See the video from Elon posting some decent moves from Optimus.

Milan Kovac, head of Optimus, comments:
“More coming shortly! The team has been working very hard in the background. Entirely trained in simulation with RL. Many optimizations and fixes have been put in place in our sim-to-real training code. The cable is there in case of a fall (not actually holding the bot) since this is an early result which will get more stable very quickly.”

SpaceX & Starlink

Starlink Direct to Cell will soon provide SMS service across Chile’s varied geography, eliminating dead zones and keeping you connected in case of emergency.

Also, seems like Starlink India coming soon — The Indian government reportedly gave Starlink conditional approval to launch its broadband offering.

xAI

Elon posts: "Been thinking about the fastest way to bring a terawatt of compute online. That is roughly equivalent to all electrical power produced in America today."

He has also been reposting a lot of posts around solar recently - is he thinking of building a large solar farm for computing needs?

If you’re looking for a serious rabbit hole of potential computing outcomes — see this SpaceX patent from last summer explained which is proposing a distributed computing system utilizing clusters of Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites (aka Starlink) which can provide services under the “X as a Service” model, including blockchaing computation as a service.

Meanwhile, it’s now confirmed xAI has reached full operational capability for Phase I of its Colossus supercomputer GPU cluster. Here are some details on the power needs — 150MW grid, 150MW of Megapack batteries as backup.

The Boring Company (TBC)

Big tunneling milestone!

For the first time, TBC has continuously mined in a Zero-People-in-Tunnel (ZPIT) configuration. There is nobody in the machine (besides the videographer), which is simultaneously advancing forward and erecting a ring (i.e. building the tunnel). Each full ring weighs ~24,000 pounds.

In the same way that full and rapid reusability is the holy grail for rockets, ZPIT continuous mining is the holy grail for Boring Machines. This is the safest, fastest, and least expensive architecture to build tunnels.

There’s a video of this here and an extended version of the video here.