Stephen Snyder

America’s best-selling vehicles are still SUVs. China’s next full-size six-seat PHEV flagship is not for sale here.

Adrian Leung at CarNewsChina reported October 25 that BYD’s Fang Cheng Bao Ti 9 launches in China after November 15, 2026. Six seats. Claimed 310 km of electric-only range on WLTC. The Shark PHEV pickup follows late November or early December. China market. Not a U.S. consumer offer.

Experian’s trailing cut into early 2025: SUVs were 62.8% of new U.S. retail registrations. In 2025, Toyota’s RAV4 led SUVs at 479,288. Honda’s CR-V was next at 403,768. Through September 2026, CR-V still led the SUV chart. Tesla Model Y was second.

One battery-electric name sits at the top of the SUV race.

Tesla ended Model S and Model X production. Inventory only. Cybertruck is still produced in Texas; Australia and New Zealand plans were cancelled. Different story. A low-volume pickup is not a conventional family SUV.

Independent observation. No partnership. ASCENDING builds the operator layer in the Phoenix East Valley. We carry no passengers today.

My belief, labeled as belief: a Tesla-built family SUV offered with FSD (Supervised---hopefully we're way past that) would be an extraordinarily "hot" item in an SUV-first America, especially with Model X off the line while China packs the three-row electrified shelf U.S. buyers cannot buy as Fang Cheng Bao.

The car is the part @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy keep pushing (---thank goodness). The work after the sale is still charging, cleaning, turnaround, and local uptime.

Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever...

#AutonomousVehicles #Robotaxi #Tesla #FleetOperations

X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

The name is MOTO-CAR. The most important word in the announcement is “preclinical.”

Neither tells you why I kept reading.

At @BYU, researchers are working on a way to reprogram macrophages, immune cells that can help solid tumors survive, so they recognize cancer, attack it and activate other immune defenses instead.

The approach tries to change what those cells do inside the tumor.

BYU reports encouraging results in laboratory cells and mice. The findings have not yet appeared in a peer-reviewed paper. Human trials have not begun. Whether this will be safe or effective in people is unknown.

Those sentences belong near the beginning. Especially when the subject is cancer.

For someone waiting on a treatment, “promising” can sound a great deal like “coming.” They are not the same word.

Students have worked on these studies for about six years. The university says findings were held unpublished to protect patents, now licensed to Thunder Biotech. More research and funding are needed before testing in people.

A patent protects an invention. It does not establish that a medicine works.

Then Dylan Eubank’s Salt Lake Tribune story gives the research a human face.

The professor behind it lost both parents to cancer.

His name is Kim O’Neill. He teaches microbiology and molecular biology at BYU and founded Thunder Biotech in 2016.

His loss is not evidence that the treatment will succeed. It is a reason to read about the person as carefully as we read about the experiment.

I admire the persistence here. Years of student work. A difficult biological question. An answer that still has to earn its way from the laboratory to a patient.

I empathize as I actually moved back to Ohio to care and assist with my father's death process while dealing with Cancer. Then five weeks after my father's passing, my mother faced the untimely discovery that she was already in the "throws" of Stage 4 Cancer.

There is room to care deeply about this research without declaring victory for it.

We do not have to choose between hope and accuracy. Families deserve both.

Reporting: Dylan Eubank, The Salt Lake Tribune; Sharman Gill, BYU News. Personal background: Gillian Garmon, BYU Life Sciences.

Stephen Snyder writes from Gilbert, Arizona, where he is building something else entirely.

#BYU #CancerResearch #MedicalResearch

Tesla keeps announcing cities. I am watching for the announcement that makes two of them one.
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This morning, November 9, Tesla announced Robotaxi availability in San Antonio and a larger service area in Austin.
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Austin. San Antonio. Dallas. Fort Worth. Houston.
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Five Texas cities. For now, separate service areas.
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Sawyer Merritt estimates San Antonio’s launch footprint at about 275 square miles and Austin’s expanded footprint at 443. His measurements, not Tesla’s published figures.
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That is considerable geography. But the most interesting mileage is still between the shaded areas.
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A launch adds a city to the list. An expansion adds destinations to the ride.
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Eventually, I expect something bigger: expanding footprints touching, connecting, and making a trip between markets bookable as one ride.
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Not another launch. A connection.
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Dallas and Fort Worth. Austin and San Antonio. Over time, the larger Texas network those names suggest.
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Tesla has not announced that outcome. It is my reading of the direction. The connecting roads must be supported and the rides permitted; touching boundaries alone do not put a passenger through.
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But count only cities and you miss what connecting them could change. A rider does not need five launch announcements. A rider needs the destination inside the service area.
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That is why I watch Texas from Gilbert.
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Tesla has named Phoenix as coming soon, without a date. When service opens here, I expect the story to keep moving beyond opening day: more streets, more destinations, and eventually more connected communities.
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Gilbert. Mesa. Chandler. Tempe.
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The Arizona opportunity I see is not simply getting switched on. It is what becomes reachable afterward.
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ASCENDING AUTONOMY is preparing the local fleet work: charging, cleaning, turnaround and rider support. We are independent of Tesla, have no partnership and are not operating yet.
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Tesla builds the intelligence that drives the car. ASCENDING is building the intelligence that runs the fleet.
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The first headline is where the ride starts. The bigger story is where it stops having to end.
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Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever...
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Sources: Tesla’s Robotaxi announcements; Sawyer Merritt’s map estimates. Reporting by Kirsten Korosec at TechCrunch and Nehal Malik at Not a Tesla App.
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#Tesla #Robotaxi #AutonomousVehicles #Arizona
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X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing

Tempe Town Lake is closed to boats and fishing, and a national collegiate triathlon championship was switched to a duathlon. Historic flows carried whatever was upstream into it.
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Start at home. The @SRPconnect reservoir system climbed from 53% to 70% in five days, about 120 billion gallons, ABC15's Zander Adams reported. "Just in a few days, we saw what we get all winter," senior hydrologist Stephen Flora said.
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SRP's Jacob Richardson told AZFamily's Steven Sarabia the watershed's rain had about a one-in-150-year probability. SRP expects the Verde's October and November inflows to be its highest since 1972, about eight times average.
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To manage its reservoirs, SRP also released about 54,000 cubic feet per second from Bartlett and Stewart Mountain dams, some 403,000 gallons every second, down the normally dry Salt toward the Gila and Yuma.
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Every drop of that fell on Arizona. The Salt and Verde drain Arizona's own high country, and up to half of the water greater Phoenix uses comes down them. In Gilbert, where I'm building ASCENDING, the Eastern Canal carries it through town.
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Utah's water takes a longer road to the Valley, and only from the parts of Utah that drain to the Colorado River.
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In late October the San Juan, swollen by floods upstream in Colorado and New Mexico, forced evacuations in Bluff, Montezuma Creek and Aneth. The weather service in Grand Junction warned of catastrophic flooding. On Nov. 2, Cottonwood Wash flooded Bluff again.
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The San Juan empties into Lake Powell. So far in October it had supplied about a third of Powell's inflow, against a usual 13%, The Salt Lake Tribune reported.
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By Oct. 26, Powell had risen nearly 11 feet off its Sept. 15 record low, roughly 173 billion gallons by ABC15's count. More than SRP's haul, over six weeks rather than five days.
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Up on the Wyoming-Utah line, Flaming Gorge has released about 600,000 acre-feet over recent months to shore Powell up, per Cowboy State Daily. A marina on its Wyoming side has stopped operating.
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From Powell the river runs to Lake Mead, and below Mead the 336-mile CAP canal carries it to Phoenix and Tucson. That supply faces a 760,000 acre-foot Arizona cut a year in 2027 and 2028 under August's federal guidelines.
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Northern Utah is the third fate. Its mountain snow feeds the Bear, Weber and Jordan rivers, and all three end in the Great Salt Lake, a basin with no exit.
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On Oct. 18, before these storms, USGS provisionally read the lake at 4,189.8 feet, 1.3 feet over the 2022 record low. What drains there stays in the Great Basin. Not one gallon of it ever reaches Arizona.
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One run of storms, three outcomes. Arizona banked its share in five days. The San Juan's took the long road into a giant. The Wasatch Front kept its share at home.
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The Colorado system is so vast that 173 billion gallons still left Powell about a quarter full. SRP's watershed is compact, so 120 billion gave the Valley a head start.
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SRP's head start was paid for long ago. In 1903, ranchers and farmers here put up their own land, over 200,000 acres, as collateral to borrow federal money for Roosevelt Dam.
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The federal government built that dam and ran the project until 1917. That year's contract left title with the United States and gave operations to the local Salt River Valley Water Users' Association, which still runs the canals.
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That handoff is the oldest version of the operator layer I know. @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy and Tesla are building the vehicle and the autonomy. The winnable local work is running the fleet, knowing the streets and keeping the rider relationship.
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That is the work ASCENDING is preparing for: Tesla Model Ys and Tesla Cybercabs in the Phoenix East Valley, across Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe.
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One example from these storms: when the releases came, East and West Valley roads built across the dry Salt River bed closed. A fleet run from here knows which crossings go under before the water arrives.
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My takeaway: what a storm leaves you is settled years before it arrives. Build the storage first.
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Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever...
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X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing
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#Arizona #Phoenix #EastValley #Gilbert #Mesa #Chandler #Tempe #SRP #ColoradoRiver #LakePowell #GreatSaltLake #Utah #Tesla #Robotaxi #Cybercab #AutonomousVehicles

This week @JayinShanghai posted an early look at @Tesla's stand for the 9th China International Import Expo in Shanghai. @ciieonline opens November 5 and runs through the 10th. At the center: a gold Cybercab with butterfly doors and no steering wheel.
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This is where the Cybercab made its Asia-Pacific debut, on November 5, 2025. It is back for a second year, in a different form.
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Shanghai's @thepapercn reports the car on the stand is the production Cybercab, the model already working in the U.S., finished in gloss where last year's was matte.
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When it first came to Shanghai, the Cybercab was something you could look at but not ride. Since early September, Cybercabs on @robotaxi have carried riders in Austin, two seats and nobody driving.
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Tesla's own help page now lists two vehicles in the robotaxi fleet: Model Y and Cybercab.
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Last year's stand also had @Tesla_Optimus and a V4 Supercharger from @TeslaCharging, and Jay's photos show both again. The one vehicle new to China since then is the Model Y Performance, launched there on September 11 and rated at 3.5 seconds from 0 to 100 km/h.
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The other first is the address. This stand sits in a zone of Tesla's own within the Lingang showcase, something Tesla has not had before, per an October briefing by the Lingang organizers.
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Lingang is the area that holds both Giga Shanghai and the Megafactory, and the zone is set up to show visitors how that plant makes cars. The @teslaenergy side of the stand is there too: Powerwall for the home and @Tesla_Megapack storage for the grid.
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If I were walking that hall, the production and energy displays would get my afternoon. A production line and a battery block will never pull a crowd like that car. They are what keeps a fleet moving.
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Every hour a car sits at a stall, in a wash bay or on a parts order is an hour with an empty seat. I spent years ordering and trading dealership inventory. A car that sits costs money every day.
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Tesla is building all three layers at once: car, autonomy and energy. Next to all that sits the daily local work, and that work never ends.
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That is ASCENDING's job: Tesla Model Ys and Tesla Cybercabs in the Phoenix East Valley, kept powered, spotless and ready for the next rider in Gilbert, Mesa, Chandler and Tempe.
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Congratulations to @elonmusk @larsmoravy @aelluswamy and the @Tesla_Asia team on a showing that puts the factory and the energy right beside the car.
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Commercial autonomous mobility in the Phoenix East Valley will arrive — sooner than most think. For me, it seems like forever...
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#Tesla #Cybercab #Robotaxi #CIIE #PhysicalAI #FleetOperations #EastValley
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X: @ASCENDING_AZ | nowascend.ing