Ever seen a seaplane launch on land?
In northern regions, just like a boat, seaplanes come out of the water for winter storage.
But a true seaplane doesn’t have wheels, so it can’t simply taxi out to the runway and take off once spring time rolls around.
This is one way they can launch.
As the truck accelerates, it gives the aircraft airspeed over the wings, which is the basic ingredient every airplane needs to fly.
Once the truck hits about 65-70 mph, the wings produce enough lift to fly and the pilot can lift right off the trailer to head back to the water.
Pretty cool to watch.
Credit: Vonda S. 🎥
If you want to understand how insanely efficient each Tesla employee is, just look at their output vs legacy OEMs.
Tesla produced 1.65 million vehicles in 2025 with ~135k employees.
That’s roughly the same employees-per-vehicle as:
- Mercedes (2.16M vehicles / 164k employees)
- BMW (2.46M vehicles / 159k employees)
But here’s the cheat code:
Tesla is ~80% vertically integrated (batteries, cells, motors, inverters, Gigacastings, software, direct sales/service, etc.).
Legacy OEMs? Only ~35% in-house. They outsource the rest, so hundreds of thousands of supplier workers don’t show up on their headcount.
Tesla’s 135k people are doing the work of a legacy OEM plus its entire supplier ecosystem.
And they still have bandwidth for the “bonus” work:
✅ Own & operate the entire global *upercharger network
✅ Record 46.7 GWh energy storage deployed
✅ Heavy ramp on Optimus humanoid robots
(FSD doesn’t count extra — it’s literally part of every car.)
Efficiency isn’t headcount.
It’s what that headcount actually builds and owns.
My personal anecdote - in 2018 I visited Shanghai for my first time, meeting with the Tesla field service team and some suppliers. I went for a run in the morning and developed a sore throat and cough. One of my local colleagues noticed and said it was not a good day to run, too much smog. I should wait for a rainy day or right after since the air is cleaner.
Since then I've made a few trips per year and watched as the air quality has significantly improved. At the same time their population of EVs has increased to nearly 50% of new vehicle sales. I can now run in the mornings without any respiratory issues.
This is even more pronounced in areas like Shanghai and Beijing where there are restrictions on vehicles entering the city in certain areas and hours to green plates (EVs) only.
A couple of photos I took in Shanghai in 2018 and 2025.
I couldn't find a recent skyline view photo but you can clearly see the blue cloudless sky in the more recent picture as compared to the hazy sky in the first picture
🚨 Tesla Owners & Fans: ADAC's brutal 2026 Winter Highway Stress Test at 0°C is out. And the Model Y shines again.🔥
With the lowest consumption in the entire field at just •22.2 kWh/100 km• (beating even the Audi winner), it delivered a solid •406 km• real world range on the Munich-Berlin Autobahn simulation. That's the most efficient EV tested. Despite AWD and SUV shape.
Only the new Audi A6 e-tron edged it out in pure range (441 km) thanks to its blazing 800V charging (300 km added in 20 min), but Tesla's efficiency is unbeatable for real world winter driving.
Proof once more: Tesla still owns efficiency & value. Surprised? 🔥❄️
#Tesla #ModelY #EVWinterTest #ADAC #ElectricVehicles
(Source: official ADAC Winter-Reichweitentest 2026)
No, this is not competition for FSD anymore than LEGO releasing a Space Shuttle kit is competition for the Falcon 9.
Nvidia has released multiple generations of ADAS development kits and tools for developing ADAS systems. These are not ADAS systems, they are tools to help get started developing an ADAS system. Nvidia has also produced multiple generations of hardware kits that can help a developer get started building the compute framework for an ADAS system using Nvidia silicon. An ADAS demo can be put together pretty quickly using these kits, but a production system cannot - the kit gets you 0.01% of the way to concept for a production system and it doesn't include most of the difficult to understand parts - it just shows what is possible. This latest kit apparently includes the a VLA as the core software architectural component. Using a VLA provides a lot of development advantages but VLAs are compute intensive and not, in their simple form, suitable for a production system.
It would be a good thing for the world if companies picked up these tools and started making a serious attempt to develop ADAS systems and I hope they do. If they were wildly successful they might start fielding them in 5 years and that could help Tesla to displace the billion plus human driven vehicles ten years from now. We need lots and lots and lots of autonomous capable vehicles and Tesla can't build all of them in any reasonable period of time.
There is no scenario in which a company building on top of this new development kit will even slightly dent Tesla's Robotaxi market opportunity. I wish it were that easy - building an FSD like system is still a technically challenging, resource intensive, and commercially fraught task. It's kind of a miracle that any company did it once. It's the thing I'm most grateful to Tesla for.
LISTEN TO THE MOMENT GARMIN EMERGENCY AUTOLAND SYSTEM ONBOARD BEECHCRAFT SUPER KING AIR ALERTED ATC AFTER PILOT INCAPACITATION.
On Dec 20, a Beechcraft Super King Air N479BR flying from Aspen to Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport went silent about 20 minutes into the short hop when the pilot stopped responding to ATC. Someone onboard activated Garmin Emergency Autoland, which immediately declared an emergency, coordinated with ATC, cleared its own flight path, and autonomously landed on Runway 30 at 2:19 p.m. Fire crews were standing by as a precaution — everyone onboard was safe.
Garmin confirmed the successful activation, marking the first real-world use of FAA-certified Autoland technology since its approval in 2020. A major milestone for aviation safety, especially for single-pilot operations where incapacitation has long been a fatal risk.
The pilot’s condition and number of passengers have not yet been disclosed.
🎧 Audio: LiveATC
📹: 1. Garmin 2. adamlendi
🇺🇸 SAN FRAN BLACKOUT – WAYMO FROZE, TESLA DROVE
Waymo’s robotaxis got a little too real last night - by completely shutting down when San Francisco’s power outage knocked out traffic lights.
Meanwhile, Teslas on FSD? Kept rolling. No drama, no headlines - just handling chaos like it’s a walk in the park.
This is what happens when you train your AI on billions of real-world miles instead of coddling it in a simulation padded with perfect data and wishful thinking.
Waymo bet on maps and order. Tesla bet on mess - and won. When the lights go out, the difference isn’t theoretical. It’s traffic.
Source: @Tesla_AI, @elonmusk
Every Elon Musk product:
1. Blastar (1984)
2. Zip2 (1995)
3. X . com (1999)
4. Tesla Roadster (2006)
5. Falcon 1 (2006)
6. Tesla Model S (2009)
7. Falcon 9 (2010)
8. Giga Fremont (2010)
9. Dragon 1 (2010)
10. Supercharging network (2012)
11. Starship (2012)
12. Hyperloop (2013)
13. Dragon 2 (2014)
14. Tesla Model X (2015)
15. New Spacesuits (2015)
16. Starlink (2015)
17. Powerwall 1 (2015)
18. Giga Nevada (2016)
19. Tesla Model 3 (2016)
20. Powerwall 2 (2016)
21. Tesla solar roof (2016)
22. FSD (2016)
23. Tesla Semi (2017)
24. Tesla Roadster 2.0 (2017)
25. Tesla solar panels (2017)
26. Giga New York (2017)
27. Neuralink (2017)
28. Not-a-Flamethrower (2018)
29. Falcon Heavy (2018)
30. Giga Shanghai (2019)
31. Tesla Cybertruck (2019)
32. Tesla Cyberquad (2019)
33. Tesla Model Y (2019)
34. Tesla Megapack (2019)
35. Tesla Insurance (2019)
36. 4680 cells (2020)
37. Short Shorts (2020)
38. Tesla Optimus (2021)
39. Giga Berlin (2022)
40. Prufrock II (2022)
41. Burnt Hair Parfume (2022)
42. Giga Texas (2022)
43. Powerwall 3 (2023)
44. Tesla Dojo (2023)
45. Giga Mexico (2023)
46. Grok (2023)
47. Cybercab (2024)
48. Robovan (2024)
49. Robotaxi (2025)
Note: this list is not exhaustive. Some of the products are in development status.