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Watch this Tesla Model S conquer Autocross [Video]
The following post was originally published on EVANNEX
Grant M. is like a superhero with a secret identity – during the week, he works as a lawyer, but on the weekends, he takes his Tesla S60 to the autocross track to do battle with the forces of fossil fuel.
Autocross, also called solo or (in Canada) autoslalom, is a timed competition in which drivers navigate a course that includes straightaways, curves and slaloms. It’s less about fast acceleration and high speed than about handling and precision driving. The autocross community is egalitarian – any kind of car can compete, and drivers of all skill levels are welcome. Courses are usually temporary, set up with cones on a speedway parking lot or a disused airstrip – this prevents experienced drivers from gaining an advantage, as the course may be different every time.
According to the Sports Car Club of America, most autocross courses are designed so that the cars won’t exceed normal highway speeds – around 55-60 mph. However, “that doesn’t mean they are slow. Well-designed courses will feel plenty fast as you attempt to maintain that speed through a series of elements. Imagine slaloming every barrel in a 55-mph construction zone, and you will start to get the idea.” As the New Brunswick Sporting Car Club puts it, “While AutoSlalom events typically involve lower speeds than other motorsports, the number of driver inputs per second is comparable to Formula One.”
Driving an electric vehicle (EV) on the autocross track is very different from driving a gas-burner. The EV’s instant acceleration gives it an advantage coming out of corners onto a straightaway. However there’s also a drawback: EVs, especially the Tesla Model S, weigh a lot more than their gas-powered counterparts. “Trying to take a corner fast and hard with a car that weighs 4,500 to 5,000 pounds” isn’t easy, Grant told us. “I’m probably 1,000 to 1,500 pounds heavier than every other car in my class.”
Regenerative braking presents another challenge. “It’s like engine braking, as if you were downshifting. You have to take that into account too – it can slow you down pretty far on a really sharp corner, and sometimes that can lead to the back end of the car sweeping out, just because while you’re braking and taking a turn, you lose contact with the tires.”
In a sense, an EV has the opposite attributes of a gas car: it’s slower in the tight turns, but faster on the straight sections. Grant’s competitors know they have to watch out for the Tesla on the straightaways. “I can’t take the corners as fast as everybody else, but when I see a straightaway, with my instant torque and acceleration I can make up some time.”
The Model S is not an ideal autocross car, so Grant doesn’t expect to win a first-place finish any time soon, but his times are improving, and he often earns a respectable place in the top 3 to 5. “It’s very hard to beat cars that are made by the manufacturers to actually go on tracks.” The BMW M3 seems to be the number-one competitor. “They’re very fast and much smaller.”
Grant competes at SCCA events in Southern California in the F Street class, in which cars must be totally stock – the only modification allowed is the tires, so some drivers opt to use “stickier” models. He’s the only Tesla driver on the Southern Cal autocross scene (and apparently the only EV driver, though he has seen a couple of Volts at events), so he and his car get a lot of attention.
Although he’s the only electric driver among a field of car guys and motorheads, Grant says he has encountered no chauvinism or hostility – on the contrary, most of the other drivers find his Tesla Model S very interesting, and are excited about the technology (he does hear some jokes about his vehicle’s silence). This being Southern California, some of the other drivers own Teslas themselves, although they prefer to bring their M3s or Corvettes to the autocross track.
In fact, Grant has become something of a Tesla ambassador to the autocross community – all the car guys have heard about the P100D and its 2.2-second 0-60 time, but he has educated many of them about nifty features such as Autopilot. Everybody wants to take the Model S for a spin, and we all know how that often ends up – it’s possible that Grant has inspired a car guy or two to buy a Tesla of their own.
And why shouldn’t you follow his example? Autocross events are held in all 50 states, and beginning racers are welcome. If you’ve ever wondered how your Model S might perform on a track, an autocross event could be a good place to find out. You’ll have fun, improve your driving skills, and help to spread the word about driving electric.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company clears final Nashville hurdle: Music City loop is full speed ahead
The Boring Company has cleared its final Nashville hurdles, putting the Music City Loop on track for 2026.
The Boring Company has cleared one of its most significant regulatory milestones yet, securing a key easement from the Music City Center in Nashville just days ago, the latest in a series of approvals that have pushed the Music City Loop project firmly into construction reality.
On March 24, 2026, the Convention Center Authority voted to grant The Boring Company access to an easement along the west side of the Music City Center property, allowing tunneling beneath the privately owned venue. The move follows a unanimous 7-0 vote by the Metro Nashville Airport Authority on February 18, and a joint state and federal approval from the Tennessee Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration on February 25. Together, these green lights have cleared the path for a roughly 10-mile underground tunnel connecting downtown Nashville to Nashville International Airport, with potential extensions into midtown along West End Avenue.
Music City Loop could highlight The Boring Company’s real disruption
Nashville was selected by The Boring Company largely because of its rapid population growth and the strain that growth has placed on surface infrastructure. Traffic has become a persistent problem for residents, convention visitors, and airport travelers alike. The Music City Loop promises an approximately 8-minute underground transit time between downtown and the Nashville International Airport (BNA), removing thousands of vehicles from surface roads daily while operating as a fully electric, zero-emissions system at no cost to taxpayers.
The project fits squarely within a broader vision Musk has championed for years. In responding to a breakdown of the Loop’s construction costs, Musk posted on X: “Tunnels are so underrated.” The comment reflected a longstanding belief that underground transit represents one of the most cost-effective and scalable infrastructure solutions available. The Boring Company has claimed it can build 13 miles of twin tunnels in Nashville for between $240 million and $300 million total, a fraction of what comparable projects cost elsewhere in the country.
Image Credit: The Boring Company/Twitter
The Las Vegas Loop, The Boring Company’s first operational system, has served as a proof of concept. During the CONEXPO trade show in March 2026, the Vegas Loop transported approximately 82,000 passengers over five days at the Las Vegas Convention Center, demonstrating the system’s capacity during large-scale events. Nashville draws millions of convention visitors and tourists each year, and local business leaders have pointed to that same capacity as a major draw for supporting the project.
The Music City Loop was first announced in July 2025. Construction began within hours of the February 25 state approval, with The Boring Company’s Prufrock tunneling machine already in the ground the same evening. The first operational segment is targeted for late 2026, with the full route expected to be complete by 2029. The project represents one of the largest privately funded infrastructure efforts currently underway in the United States.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s $10 Trillion robot: Inside Tesla’s push to mass produce Optimus
Tesla’s surging Optimus job listings reveal a company sprinting from prototype to one million robot production.
Tesla is accelerating its push to bring the Optimus humanoid robot to high volume production, and its recent job listings tells the story as clearly as any earnings call.
With well over 100 Optimus related job openings now posted across its U.S. facilities, Tesla is signaling a critical pivot for the program, moving it from a captivating tech demo to a serious manufacturing endeavor. Roles span the full spectrum of the product lifecycle, from Robotics Software Engineers and Manufacturing Engineers to Mechanical Integration Engineers and AI Engineers focused on world modeling and video generation. One active listing for a Software Engineer on the Optimus team asks candidates to build scalable and reliable data pipelines for Optimus manufacturing lines and develop automation tools that accelerate analysis and visualization for mass manufacturing.
Tesla is racing toward a one million unit annual production target. The clearest signal yet that Tesla is treating Optimus as its primary business came on January 28, 2026, during the company’s Q4 2025 earnings call. Musk announced that Tesla is ending production of the Model S and Model X, and will repurpose those lines at its Fremont, California factory to build Optimus humanoid robots.
A production intent prototype of Optimus Version 3 is planned to be ready in early 2026, after which Tesla intends to build a one million unit production line with a targeted production start by the end of 2026. To support that ramp, Tesla broke ground on a massive new Optimus manufacturing facility at Gigafactory Texas in late 2025, with ambitions to eventually reach 10 million units per year.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The business case for scaling this aggressively is rooted in labor economics. Musk has stated that “Optimus has the potential to be the biggest product of all time,” reasoning that if Tesla can produce capable humanoid robots at scale and reasonable cost, every task currently performed by human labor becomes a potential application. In a separate statement, Musk framed Optimus’s long term importance even more bluntly, saying it could surpass Tesla’s vehicle business in scale with the potential to generate $10 trillion in revenue.
The industries Tesla is targeting first are those most burdened by repetitive physical labor. Early applications include manufacturing assembly, material handling and quality inspection, as well as logistics tasks like loading, unloading, sorting, and transporting goods in warehouses and distribution centers. Longer term, Tesla’s vision is for Optimus to penetrate household, medical, and logistics scenarios at the scale of a smartphone rollout.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Boring Co. Tunnel Vision Challenge ends with a surprise for Louisiana, Maryland and Dallas
The Boring Company stunned three cities today, awarding New Orleans, Baltimore, and Dallas free underground Loop tunnels.
Elon Musk’s The Boring Company (TBC) announced today that it is building free underground Loop tunnels in three American cities: New Orleans, Louisiana; Baltimore, Maryland; and Dallas, Texas. The company had promised one winner when it launched the Tunnel Vision Challenge in January. After receiving 487 submissions, it selected three, committing to fund and construct all of them pending a feasibility review, entirely at its own expense. For a company that has faced years of skepticism over the gap between its promises and its delivered projects, choosing to expand its commitment rather than narrow it is a notable shift in both scale and accountability.
All three projects will now enter a rigorous, fully funded diligence phase that includes meetings with elected officials, regulators, community and business leaders, geotechnical borings, and a complete investigation of subsurface utilities and infrastructure. TBC confirmed that all costs associated with this diligence process are 100% funded by the company. If all three projects pass feasibility, all three get built. If only one clears the bar, that one gets built. The company’s willingness to fund the due diligence regardless of outcome removes one of the most common early-stage barriers that kills promising infrastructure proposals before they leave a spreadsheet.
Beyond the three winners, TBC announced it will continue working with two additional entrants it found compelling enough to pursue independently: the Hendersonville Utility Tunnel in Hendersonville, Tennessee, and the Morgan’s Wonderland Tunnel in San Antonio, Texas, which would notably serve one of the nation’s premier theme parks built specifically for guests with special needs.
The challenge also coincides with TBC’s most active construction period to date. The company recently began drilling on the Music City Loop near the Tennessee State Capitol in Nashville, and in February it broke ground on a Loop in Dubai. Musk has long argued that the fundamental problem with urban infrastructure is cost and bureaucratic inertia, not engineering. “The key to solving traffic is making going 3D either up or down,” he said in 2018, a conviction now reflected in a company structure built to absorb the financial risk that typically stalls public projects for years.
Music City Loop could highlight The Boring Company’s real disruption
The Tunnel Vision Challenge’s most underappreciated element may be what it produced beyond three winners. Submissions came from individuals, companies, and governments across states including Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, and Texas, as well as from international entrants. Musk captured the underlying logic years ago when he said, “Traffic is driving me nuts. I’m going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging.” Today, three American cities are counting on exactly that.
Tunnel Vision Challenge results!
We’ve been overwhelmed with the amazing submissions…so we are announcing three winners!
The Thrilling Three are:
– NOLA Loop (New Orleans, LA)
– Ravens Loop (Baltimore, MD)
– University Hills Loop (Dallas, TX)What happens next? TBC and the… https://t.co/cY2ULftfiK
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) March 24, 2026
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