Lifestyle
Here’s what happened at Tesla’s VIP Factory Tour and Q&A with Franz von Holzhausen
Model S-owning YouTuber and Tesla’s referral program leader for most referred sales, DÆrik, shared the low down on Friday’s VIP Factory Tour event in Fremont, California. The invite-only factory tour also featured a Model 3 and a private Q&A session with Tesla Senior Design Executive Franz von Holzhausen.
DÆrik shared that they were able to see the Model 3 at the event, but it was an Alpha unit and they were not able to touch it, sit in it, or be driven around in it. The Model 3 experience was a bit underwhelming but that was expected based on confirmation from Tesla prior to the event that the production-ready Model 3 would not be in attendance. With the official production Model 3 reveal and first delivery slated for sometime in July, it doesn’t comes as a surprise that Tesla didn’t put any emphasis on showcasing a release candidate of its upcoming mass market sedan during Friday’s VIP Tour.
Teslarati received reports from attendees who indicated that the VIP Factory Tour was not much different than a standard Fremont Factory Tour. Attendees learned about the history of the factory, were shown various production lines in action and were told about the factory’s commitment to unparalleled safety.
After the factory tour, attendees were whisked away by shuttle to a building across the street from for lunch and a Q&A session with Franz. Luckily for us, DÆrik captured all questions and accompanying responses in his second video update which we posted below. To make it easier for our readers, we have transcribed DÆrik’s account of the Q&A, as follows.
Q&A with Tesla Design Executive Franz von Holzhausen
The first 5 questions had been determined in advance, while 10 additional questions were obtained from the live audience. Here are the 5 predetermined questions and answers:
1. How do you feel to have designed the world’s most anticipated car (referring to Model S)?
He didn’t know it would be such a success in the beginning but he felt a desire and a need to just go for it. He felt it was a big opportunity.
2. Did you design Tesla Model S and X to be the safest cars?
The entire design of Model S and X was safety first and everything else was built around that.
3. What was the definition of design vs. style?
Design is more about solving problems and style is more of a personal taste. They are as much designers as engineers at Tesla.
4. What was the most challenging aspect of the Model S and X?
Model S: the door handles.
Model X: the falcon wing doors.
5. What was the design approach for Powerwall and Solar Roof?
Tesla designers were looking at the most efficient way to produce to combine it and make it beautiful. They wanted to make it completely flow as a line of energy products.
The next 10 questions were submitted by the audience.
6. Why did they include the black front end on the fascia of the Model S and why did they switch it later?
It gave a shorter appearance on the front end and made it look lower. He talked about how it framed the badging and helped with brand recognition on the Model S. After the brand had been established, they felt comfortable to refresh the front end.
7. How about a convertible?
No comment.
8. Design challenges for the Model 3?
To make a truly great affordable project and a sexy car. Sexy car were his words.
9. What about a Truck? See Elon’s Tweet.
10. How about a Sports Car? See Elon’s Tweet.
11. Favorite challenge to solve in Model 3 versus Model S?
He said he couldn’t go into too much detail but that he wanted to create a beautiful car at the price point without having to give anything up. So the process was generally the same as the Model S.
12. As batteries become more efficient will the space required for them go down or will Tesla continue to increase the overall battery capacity?
The battery on the bottom of the car allows for a ton of flexibility. They will always be looking out and focusing on efficiency and range and performance.
13. There are 120 people on Franz’s team. How many people contribute or is Franz in charge of the overall look and does he delegate?
There are thousands of decisions to make all the time. The team goes through design phases. Some are empowered to make decisions however, Franz likes to stay involved as much as possible. Elon has the final say. They have digital designers, they have clay modelers and everything is designed under one roof.
14. Tesla vs typical auto manufacturers. How do they compare since Franz has history with that?
What sets Tesla apart and what is Tesla’s ‘special sauce’? Good communication. Good communication between the designers and the engineers.
15. Did your friends think you were crazy when you left your stable career to work at Tesla?
Yes because it was such a new idea. It wasn’t known, they didn’t have a Model S on the road yet but it made sense to him. He had an opportunity to do a product that no one knew and do it from the ground up.
The VIP event was not mind-blowing but one could interpret some of Franz’s remarks as insight on what’s to come. Right? Ahem, Tesla convertible.
A big thanks to DÆrik for jotting down these notes. Be sure to subscribe to the channel here.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig
Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.
Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”
This is the future we shall bring into being pic.twitter.com/8aD0w8MDVc
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 20, 2026
The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.
This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.
What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.
That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Tesla is now shipping Cybercabs from Giga Texas with Starlink hardware built in as standard.
Tesla’s Cybercabs are now leaving Gigafactory Texas with Starlink hardware on the rear hatch in significant numbers, according to drone footage captured Tuesday by longtime Austin drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. Production at the factory ramped back up after the Labor Day weekend, and his flyover of the outbound lot showed rows of gold Cybercabs alongside Model Y Long Wheelbase units, many carrying the satellite module for the first time as standard equipment rather than a one off retrofit.
Giga Texas today is busy with production coming back up following the long weekend. Of interest today in the outbound lot is the appearance of hundreds of Mode; YL’s and many more Cybercabs and for the 1st time equipped with the Starlink module one the hatch in big numbers.
At… pic.twitter.com/G9yl6s51m4
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 8, 2026
Tesla first showed Starlink built into an actual Cybercab on August 10, when the Robotaxi account posted images of a single gold unit with the antenna integrated into the roofline above the taillights and called it the first Cybercab with Starlink integration. That followed a July reveal where Tesla and Starlink jointly posted a cutaway diagram of the antenna placement without a working vehicle to back it up. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software, said at the time that the connection isn’t required for the car to drive itself. It exists mainly for navigation, customer service and keeping tabs on the fleet.
Musk has made a different case in public. During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, he said the company can’t afford robotaxis stranded in what he called “Bermuda Triangles of lack of cellular connectivity,” and he separately claimed on X that Starlink will eventually reach every Tesla built, calling it the only way to deliver high bandwidth to billions of vehicles. He has also pitched the antenna as an entertainment upgrade, telling riders they would be able to stream 4K video or play games during a trip.
The rollout has moved fast since. Robotaxi service opened to the public in Austin on September 3, and Cybercabs had already been spotted with Starlink hardware in Houston and near Miami International Airport in the weeks before Tuesday’s factory footage showed the module shipping at volume rather than on scattered test units. Whether the satellite link earns its keep is still an open question. Tesla’s unsupervised service currently runs in dense metro geofences in Texas and Florida, markets where cellular coverage is already strong, which is not where the rural dead zones Musk describes tend to show up.
SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
