Well, at least it's one of them. I read they were already going to break ground in multiple locations while waiting for the final decision and approval. So this doesn't mean that the actual factory will be built there. Quite a bold trade-off, actually, wasting some money by starting to build in several places that may end up not being used, just to avoid having to wait for politicians to make up their minds. Elon doesn't like to waste time.

And who knows, those locations may end up housing gigafactories as well, just at a later time.

Actually, it should be the off-world driving record for vehicles originating from earth.

On some internet connections with restrictive filters, pages containing "dirty words" are automatically blocked. Happens to me every now and then when I'm surfing at work, even on innocent sites. I did get them to whitelist Slashdot, though. Other people might not be so lucky.

And how could Apple become as good as it is? Hmmm...

Did you warn them about 9/11?

What's the use of that, if you have to wait 18 years for her to grow up? Unless you want a future mate for your newborn son?

And where does the money come from that pays for those ads?

I just checked on the Tesla forum: they just didn't update that part of the website, but most current superchargers are 120 kW right now except for a handful of early ones.

OK, that little tidbit of information makes all the difference. 16kWh battery, now I'm impressed. I knew there was something missing, the record was way too underwhelming and close to actual production cars on our roads right now.

Well, they just announced the new battery, they're not actually selling it just yet, but anyway, even if they're just below the record, with an ordinary production car that anyone with enough money can buy, I would expect a university team with a specially built car driving at constant speed to do way, way better.

That's weird, they keep stating that figure just about everywhere (including at the top of the page, and in the FAQ lower on the page, so I'm not sure whether they are using false advertising or they simply forgot to update that line about "we will soon". It's the figure I was given on my test drive as well. I'll try to find out for sure.

Even better, Tesla has announced a new battery to retrofit into their old roadster model, which will bring its range up to 640 km (400 miles) EPA rated range. Maybe that's at a lower speed, I'm not sure how EPA rated range is calculated, but certainly close enough to make this new record by a university team rather unimpressive. My first reaction to the summary was "isn't their a zero missing somewhere?".

No, that's not the future performance of their next iteration of superchargers, it's the actual performance of their current superchargers. They've got more than 150 of them now.

This "intelligent avatar" thing, however, is probably going to be the worst of both worlds: the slowness of human interaction (waiting for an artificially generated face to actually speak out the words instead of just skimming the text on the screen in a fraction of the time) combined with a complete lack of common sense. And of course the avatar is going to speak as slowly as possible to make sure even the most retarded passenger can understand it, etc...

I really hope they'll at least include a start screen with two options: text based or avatar. But more than likely, they'll be so proud of their incredible technological achievement that you'll have no such choice.

Yes, it has a "key fob" to allow anyone to steal your car as long as you are in range with the fob when they drive off (for example if you are standing next to the car). When they get out of range, the car will complain about the missing fob but will still continue to drive until you turn it off (or run out of battery). But you can use the remote control on your phone to honk the horn, lower the windows etcetera while they are driving, hopefully attracting attention to them.

(Note: this is how it worked a while ago, they might have issued an update to fix that particular issue)