HANDSThe spec · no cars bought yet
Every car will be the same car.
Not a marketplace of whatever turned up. One spec for the cars we buy, one standard, one software version at a time, so you know exactly what's arriving before you book it. This is that spec, written down before we own a single car.
The one hard rule
We will not buy a Hardware 3 car. At any price.
Tesla has said outright that its older cars cannot run the software without a driver. A bargain HW3 Model 3 is a car that can never do the thing this company exists to do.
It's the most expensive rule we've set ourselves and the easiest one to defend. Every car we buy has to still be useful on the day the software is certified to run unsupervised. Anything else is buying a vehicle with a built-in expiry date and hoping nobody notices.
The same logic rules out most of the cheap used inventory, which is exactly why it's cheap.
- Hardware 4 computer, verified in the service menu, not from the listing
- 2024 or newer
- Under 60,000 miles at purchase
- Battery health above 92% of original
- No structural repair history
- FSD capability transferable or subscribable on that VIN
- Light interior rejected — it does not survive commercial use
A Tesla someone lends us runs to a slightly wider rule — 2023 or newer, under 80,000 miles — because we are not the ones buying it. Those terms are on the drive page.
The cars
What you'll be sitting in
The launch fleet we are buying towards. Nothing in this table has been bought yet, and the mix will move around as we find cars that pass the checklist.
| Car | Seats | Bags | Range | Assigned to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Model Y Long Range | 4 + operator | 3 large | ~310 mi | Airport, general |
| Model Y RWD | 4 + operator | 3 large | ~260 mi | City, short hops |
| Model 3 Long Range | 3 + operator | 2 large | ~330 mi | Reserved, long runs |
WILL BE IN EVERY CAR
The rear screen
A second display facing the back seat, mirroring the car's perception view. We expect it to be the most talked-about thing in the car, and it costs about $120.
WILL BE IN EVERY CAR
The sign
The LED panel in the rear glass running the OK-eye. Sixty dollars, and it's the entire advertising budget. How it works →
WILL BE IN EVERY CAR
Dashcam, kept 30 days
All cameras, every trip, retained for a month whether anything happened or not. It is there to protect the operator as much as the company.
WILL BE IN THE DOOR POCKET
Water, cable, sick bag
Two bottles, a USB-C and a Lightning cable that actually work, and the thing nobody wants to ask for at 2am.
WILL BE FREE ON REQUEST
Child seats
Forward-facing seats and an infant carrier, on two hours' notice. No charge, because charging for a car seat is a strange way to treat a family.
WILL NOT BE FITTED
No advertising screens inside
Nothing in the cabin tries to sell you anything. The screen shows the drive and nothing else. This is a deliberate choice and we're not revisiting it.
- Charged to 90%, or swapped for one that is
- Interior wiped, floor vacuumed, screens cleaned
- Cameras cleaned — a dirty camera degrades the software before it warns you
- Tyre pressures checked cold
- Software version confirmed against the fleet standard
- Full exterior wash, wheels and glass
- Interior detail, seats shampooed monthly
- Tyre tread measured and recorded
- Every intervention from that car reviewed with its operators
Upkeep
Camera cleaning is a safety procedure.
It sounds like housekeeping. It isn't. A film of road salt on a pillar camera quietly degrades the software's confidence long before the car says a word about it.
It is a known failure mode, it is well documented by owners in salted climates, and it is the sort of thing a fleet discovers the expensive way if nobody wrote the procedure down first.
So it is on the between-shift checklist with a signature next to it from day one, rather than after a winter of drifting numbers taught us to put it there.
Software
New versions go on two cars for three days first
Not the whole fleet at once. Two cars, seventy-two hours, on ordinary shifts, with their interventions compared against the same routes on the old version.
If it's better, everything gets it. If it's worse, we say so publicly and hold. Saying that out loud costs us nothing today, which is exactly why it is worth writing down today — the time to commit to publishing a bad result is before you have one.