I took the 10-year-old to the 12 Hours of Sebring IMSA race, conveniently located right next to the Sebring airport.
Chevy, whose team finished just behind the Porsche 911 team, brought the latest Corvette ZR1X to the event:
I’m not sure who needs 1,250 horsepower to get to Publix, especially given that the nearest curve on a public road is in Georgia. The sacrifice of the front trunk space seriously compromises the ZR1X’s utility as a car. Chevy also brought the “Stars and Steel” 250th anniversary of the U.S. edition Corvette (a car that is made out of plastic (body) and engine (aluminum)):
Consistent with the quantities of alcohol previously consumed at Sebring, a drunken 4-day experience for many, Ford brought a Mustang tipped on its side:
Access to the elevated viewing deck is limited to Mustang owners and, presumably, their friends, so try to show up with a Mustang owner. Here’s the view from the top:
There’s a small museum next door. Reflect on the fact that today’s Islamic Republic of Great Britain was once sufficiently mighty to engineer and manufacture cars that could run continuously for 12 hours:
The next car event for the weekend was Cars and Coffee in Boca Raton at the office park in which the IBM PC was developed 44.5 years ago. I’ll cover that when the PC turns 45.
The final car event was a show here in Jupiter at the Double Roads Tavern. This show was heavier on antiques than the usual South Florida event. Here’s a 1946 Ford cab-over-engine (COE) truck:
A Lincoln Continental next to a 1955 Thunderbird (the first year for a car that lasted until 1997 and then had a retro version from 2002-2005) next to a 1957 DeSoto:
A lot of old pickup truck action:
This Chevy 3100 was a work of art:
Maybe the El Camino (1968) should be brought back for those who want to transport bicycles rather than the heavy cargo for which the Ford F-150 is spec’d:
What happens to all of these collectibles when Americans are no longer able to drive because robots have taken over? Will it be fun to sit in the passenger seats while the Optimus robot does the driving of a classic car? If not, do the ones that aren’t in museums get scrapped?
A friend with an incandescent hatred of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Republicans in general bought a Tesla Y at the end of 2025 because he wanted to relax with FSD on regular trips from Boston to Manhattan. A base model RWD Tesla Y leased here in Florida, as of December 22, 2025:
With a subsidy from the working class in Maskachusetts:
(It’s a $3,500 subsidy from state taxpayers, but the lease is $3,888 cheaper over 36 months, presumably due to the time value of the $3,500 paid immediately. Note that the low price from Tesla is no longer available. As of right now, the price is up more than $100/month compared to three months ago.)
How’s he enjoying the machine, which has now gone about 4,000 miles, 94% of them on FSD? “I give it an A-,” he said, and compared it to a high-quality aircraft autopilot (he’s a rare example of a private aircraft owner/pilot who is also a loyal Democrat). The only consistent shortcoming that he has identified is that the car doesn’t get in and out of parking lots very well. He hates paying Elon Musk $110 per month ($100 for the FSD subscription plus $10/month for a required communication subscription) because he hates Elon Musk for being Trump-adjacent. On the other hand, he doesn’t want to return to manual driving. The car hasn’t been nearly as reliable as our Hondas. He has had some intermittent computer/camera problems and a rear side window actually cracked due to stress (maybe Boston’s cold weather contributed, but Tesla covered it under warranty).
Another friend in Maskachusetts is a dentist who drives about two hours round-trip every day to her practice (Medicaid is the path to max income for a dentist in MA, but most dentists don’t want to live in a Medicaid-heavy neighborhood). She also got a Tesla Y towards the end of 2025. Queried in March: “Loving fsd. Even did it in the snow.” I respect her opinion more than that of my tech friends because she’s not interested in tech.
Tesla FSD meets South Florida: I got an Uber ride home from the art museum in West Palm Beach to our house in Jupiter, a 20-mile trip. The machine was a 2021 Model 3 with 103,000 miles, owned by the driver since mid-2025. He had it set for “Hurry”. Tesla’s software was cautious when a cyclist appeared from the left and might conceivably have come into our lane. The machine handled the 6-lane local roads reasonably well, but stayed in the left lane longer than a human would have given the impending need to turn right onto a ramp (the human can override this behavior via the turn signal). FSD handled the traffic circles near our house perfectly. It came to hard stops at 4-way intersections in the neighborhood that a human driver would have turned into rolling stops. It got a little confused at the very end and tried to go into an alley next to our house (MacArthur Foundation laid out Abacoa with garages in the back). The Uber driver said that FSD is almost perfect from his point of view except that it doesn’t do well in the rain if it sees puddles. He estimates a 4:1 fatigue ratio of manual vs FSD. (Others I have talked to have said 3:1 or less.)
The car seemed to be in near-new condition despite its age and 100,000+ miles. Not sure the white fake leather seats would survive our kids…
(The puddle issue might be his car having HW3 rather than the current HW4 or the glorious HW5 that we were supposed to have now but won’t until mid-2027. Maybe this Rembrandt “scholar” is what Elon will look like when HW5/“AI5” finally ships?)
From a friend with an old Tesla 3 and a new-ish Cybertruck:
Today I tried the new new new Tesla update that almost no one has. 14.2.2.1. It was flawless [on the Cybertruck]. I forgot to worry about it as if another human was driving.
My response: “We know that it isn’t a cult because each release is “flawless” or “perfect” and then the next release is “more flawless” and “more perfect”. (Even my friends have learned to hate me, in case you were curious.) Tesla Fanboi:
No. I have told you many times FSD sucked and that is why I didn’t buy it. I have owned my Tesla for 6 years and the first time I ever said FSD was kinda good was in October, and I was today years old the first time I said it was really good.
My personal plan was to wait for HW5 or “AI5” before getting a Tesla, but now it seems that I probably won’t live to see the AI5 era. The latest slip:
A friend who lives in Switzerland owns a Model Y. The government there forced Tesla to roll back everyone’s software to 2019 and FSD is strictly illegal almost everywhere in Europe (it’s not hazardous to import tens of millions of humans from the world’s most violent and dysfunctional societies, but Tesla’s binary code is a civilization-ending threat). He recently rented a Cybertruck on Turo in Fort Lauderdale ($200+/day; pickup and return to FLL garage). He’s spent 3-4 hours per day on FSD while looking at various places to relocate his family to (he was born in the U.S.). He says There was one “phantom braking” incident on a local street where the system got confused by a shadow and braked moderately hard (he overrode this decision with the accelerator). “It probably wouldn’t have done that if there had been a car in front of me,” he noted. “Overall, it’s a game-changer for South Florida commuting and I’m sure it won’t be long before the last bugs are worked out and the system is approved for fully autonomous Cybercabs.”
In other news, my dream of a self-driving minivan might be arriving at around the same time as Tesla’s AI5 hardware. Mercedes is going to bring a pimped minivan EV, a format popular in China, to the US (Car and Driver). Unlike Tesla, Mercedes has no Nazi history, of course, so it can be purchased with qualms. The German minivan is interesting because Nazi-free Mercedes is working with NVIDIA to compete with Tesla in “full self-driving” (i.e., not self-driving because a human has to be constantly monitoring). Car and Driver tested this in January and it seems promising. Minivan leaders Honda and Toyota, by contrast, aren’t even beginning to think about a Tesla-style system. They would rather lose 100 percent of their customers than sell anything below Level 3 (full autonomy). Here’s the beautiful Mercedes minivan, showing what a luxury car company can do:
Here’s a bit of sad news from everyone’s favorite semiconductor physicist:
If Britney Spears had enough money to buy the depicted non-self-driving BMW why didn’t she instead choose a self-driving Tesla? In that case, there wouldn’t have been any possibility of the police noticing erratic driving. She might have been breaking the law and failing to be prudent, but she wouldn’t have been pulled over so long as the Tesla software wasn’t also impaired by alcohol.
The Manheim Used Vehicle Value Index (MUVVI) rose to 205.5, reflecting a 0.4% increase for wholesale used-vehicle prices (adjusted for mix, mileage, and seasonality) compared to December 2024. The December index is up 0.1% month over month. The long-term average monthly move for December is flat, showing no change from month to month.
Prices actually went up in the past year? Not if you adjust for inflation. Up 0.4% is the new down once you subtract roughly 3% inflation. So the correlation with migration seems to exist, but isn’t 1.
Last month I embarked on a day trip to Orlando for Free Play Florida. It’s a 2:15 drive from our house, nearly all of which is on roads that GM Super Cruise or Ford BlueCruise could handle as well as, of course, any of Elon Musk’s creations.
Much to my surprise, I was able to do this 150-mile trip via Cirrus SR20 in only a little more time than it would have taken, door-to-door, by car. The Cirrus was more fun, I guess, and saved me from the monotony of staying in a lane on Florida’s Turnpike for two hours (the autopilot handled nearly all of the enroute flying). Let’s look at the cost. Driving:
300 miles round-trip at IRS rate of 70 cents/mile = $210 (and that’s the marginal cost for someone who already owns a car; day trips aren’t for the working class anymore, thanks to the miracle of coronapanic shutdowns that made cars cost more than $50,000 and the open borders that keep their wages low)
Flying:
I drove 50 miles round trip to the airport so that’s $35 at IRS rates
Two hours of Hobbs time in the old Cirrus round-trip at flight school rates (which include fuel) is about $1,000.
Three $20 tips, one at each FBO encounter: $60 (not required, but I enjoy saying the no-longer-ironic “This will pay for half of your next Starbucks” and, also, I like to reward people who go to work every day in what has become a work-optional society)
Rental car in Kissimmee (KISM) plus gas = $130. (Would presumably have been cheaper at MCO, but the general aviation fees there are higher.)
Piston GA is thus slower and about 6X the cost ($1,225 total). It was more fun because I interacted with some nice people at both Stuart and Kissimmee (other pilots, line guys, front deskers, the Go Rentals gal). Tesla FSD users say that they find the fatigue level from monitoring the self-driving system is only about one third of what is when actually driving. So the trip could have been done via FSD at the same fatigue level as a 50-mile-each-way excursion. Also, most Americans love to consume alcohol. More or less everyone at the Columbia restaurant in Celebration (Disney’s New Urbanism community) was drinking sangria and I could have indulged in a glass if I hadn’t needed to fly back later that evening (Grok says that I could have three drinks before getting close to the legal limit, but I’m a lightweight so my practical limit is one drink).
(Maybe alcohol will ultimately be banned in Celebration, though? In a 15-minute walk around the lake I observed at least three burqa-clad Muslims and I don’t know why they’d want their kids to see women in halter tops drinking margaritas at outdoor tables. There are plenty of dry towns in Maskachusetts. It would be tougher to implement this in Florida according to Gemini because FL Section 562.45(2)(c) prevents a locality from stepping on the state’s regulatory toes.)
Separately, I want to give a small shout-out to Signature (formerly “The Evil Empire”) for mostly keeping piston GA alive by waiving nearly all fees with the purchase of a minimal amount of 100LL at nearly all of its locations (not KTEB!). It’s an unwelcome economic event, I’m sure, when a piston aircraft shows up but Signature does a good job of hiding its disappointment.
A friend in suburban Boston apparently delights in enraging his neighbors and, thus, purchased a Cybertruck. His monstrous machine upgraded itself to FSD v14 last night. Our message exchange:
have you tried it?
Just did. It was needing to make a left turn onto a side street. A car was coming in the other direction making a right turn on the same road. They had their turn signal on. The truck turned in front of them and went first, violating the right of way.
So it had one dangerous failure in its first 15 minutes of use?
5 minutes
A New Jersey-based Tesla Y owner in the same group:
It is much more twitchy than v13. It will hesitate hard at blowing leaves and other situations. But it is much more responsive to legit threats, like when another car starts to enter your lane.
(My friends love paying taxes to progressive Democrats!)
A friend in central New Jersey has a new Tesla Model Y:
I just calculated my effective $/kWh rate on my first month of the EV charging plan. Regular rate is ~$0.24/kWh. After 9pm, I get charged $0.04/kWh. Last month of charging has cost me $10.
My response:
The peasant renter pays 24 cents for electricity at night. The elite homeowner with the new Tesla pays 4 cents, It’s a great country.
Loosely related, a plug-in hybrid at our local strip mall:
All of the 2026 cars are out by now, I think. Are there any Japanese cars on the market that offers features comparable to the American leaders in self-driving (“advanced driver-assistance systems” or “ADAS” if we want to be precise)?
Toyota has its 2018 “Safety Sense 2.0” on the Sienna minivan and a couple of slightly more refined versions on other models. Honda has “Honda Sensing” from 2015, with slight refinements.
If Toyota and Honda can’t do this in-house why wouldn’t they partner with Tesla, GM, or Ford? Toyota actually did partner with Intel/Mobileye during coronapanic (May 2021 press release), but that partnership seems to have been only about as productive as Intel’s DEI programs (“We’ve focused lots more on gender than race, and now we need to put emphasis on those areas together,” Gelsinger said at the CNBC event [in 2020, just as humans of all races and gender IDs were being felled by SARS-CoV-2]).
Here’s the GM Super Cruise map for the area near us. The system would make sense for doing the long trips that we currently very seldom do… maybe because we don’t have GM Super Cruise. It wouldn’t support 90 percent of the trips that we currently make. It also doesn’t seem like a system that could reduce accidents because it doesn’t even try to work on the kinds of roads where accidents typically happen.
Why are the Japanese engineering titans reduced to midget status in self-driving? Could it be that Japanese standards are too high? They don’t want to put their name on something that works well only some of the time? (This is how Apple was able to commercialize the Xerox PARC-developed WIMP (“windows, icons, menus, pointer”) style of computing. Xerox didn’t want to put its name on anything useless so it came up with a minimum price of $7,500 for a machine with ample memory and a hard drive. Apple didn’t have a reputation for building useful machines and thus was happy to ship a $2,500 machine with an absurd 128K of RAM and a floppy drive. Note that this January 1984 price is $8,000 adjusted to post-Biden dollars.)
Tesla full self-driving (FSD) was great before and now is even greater:
The FSD release in about 6 weeks will be a dramatic gain with a 10X higher parameter count and many other improvements. It’s going through training & testing now.
Once we confirm real-world safety of FSD 14, which we think will be amazing, the car will nag you much less.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the automaker’s Robotaxi platform launch later this month will essentially force other companies to license Full Self-Driving to achieve their own goals of achieving autonomy.
The world is full of car companies, many of which are too small to fund autonomy. If Tesla FSD is as great as Tesla, Elon, and the Tesla fanboys say, why doesn’t any other car company want to license it? There are about 50 significant car and truck makers worldwide. Why doesn’t even one of these 50 want to rely on Tesla’s FSD?
From early this morning…
Just finished a long AI5 design review with the Tesla California and Texas chip engineers. It’s going to be great.
