upworthy

tesla

Tifanie Mayberry and David Frazier discuss their chance encounter.

Usually, when you read a story about people being confronted in a grocery store parking lot, it's bad news. But not this time. Back in November of 2023, Portland, Oregon-based photographer David Frazier had an uplifting experience in the parking lot of a New Seasons market after being approached by a female admirer.

He later told the story on TikTok in a video that received over 3.4 million views. While making a quick run to the store, Frazier parked next to a woman driving a Tesla. He noticed she was eating, hanging around, and “vibing,” so he flashed her a smile and went into the store, where he picked up a bite to eat.

Upon returning to his car, the woman was still there. She rolled down her window and asked Frazier, “Hey, are you single?” Frazier was taken aback by the question and replied: “Sadly, yes, I am. Um, also very gay, though.”

@wowrealneat

Dear New Seasons Parking Lot Girl, you’re so cool and ily ❤️ #fyp #portland #parkinglot #xoxo

 

He told the woman he was flattered and that asking never hurts. "You're just so handsome," she replied. Frazier returned the compliment, calling her "pretty," and the two shared a laugh and went their separate ways.

But the interaction stuck with Frazier. He thought it took real "guts" to tell a stranger you think they're attractive. He also felt that it was "kind" and "flattering" for her to compliment him. "She seemed like such a genuine and kind and earnest" and "cool" person, he said in the video.

He hoped the TikTok video he made would eventually reach her somehow. “You have uplifted me in a way that I didn’t know I needed, and it made me feel amazing, and I just wanted to say thank you and I hope you have such an incredible weekend,” Frazier told the woman through his post. He also invited her to get a “friend coffee.”'

Five weeks after Frazier posted the video, it successfully reached its intended audience of one. Tifanie Mayberry, the woman driving the Tesla, saw it. She shared a reaction video in which she watched Frazier’s original post. The video received over 11 million views.

@tifaniemayberry

#duet with @David #fyp WOW!! Never expected for this to come back around like this. OMG. The internet is internetting and I LOVE it!!

 

Mayberry followed up the reaction video with another, explaining that her behavior in the parking lot that day was a perfect example of where she is in life. She’s 35, single, and ready to settle down and have kids. If that means she has to be a little forward in approaching men, so be it.

"So what you're witnessing is me just being like no BS and being 'like okay if I see me a good one, I just like to lasso them, and reel 'em in’ and be like 'Hey, I'm interested,' and that's just kind of where I am in life. And apparently, this one got back to me in a very unexpected way,” she said.

Mayberry added that she has yet to speak with Frazier but is looking forward to meeting him. She hopes that one day he’ll even make it to her wedding. "Do I want to be wing friends? Absolutely. Do I want him to be at my wedding when I finally get married? Absolutely," she said. "I just have such a deep appreciation for the love that has transpired from this sweet little moment. Never had I expected it to come into this form."


@tifaniemayberry

Well its been a very funny ending to 2023, and I have to say it ended things on such a great note for me 🥹❤️✨ Thanks TikTok!! @David - Coffee in the New Year?!

 


This article originally appeared last year.

We all know the feeling. Looking at your energy bill can be a lot like this:

How the heck did I use $30,000 worth of electricity? Was it all my Tesla coils? Photo from iStock.

Electricity is expensive. Renewable energy could help, but the technology has its hurdles to overcome, including cost, availability, and infrastructure.


There's also another psychological barb: A lot of renewable energy tech is kind of goofy-looking.

So Elon Musk has a new plan. He wants to make solar power super pretty.

Image from Tesla.

On Friday, Elon Musk announced that his company would make glass roofing shingles that double as solar panels.

There have been solar shingles before, but what makes Tesla's different is they're incredibly pretty. Compared to those big, bulky, blue ping-pong tables we probably normally think of, these are downright artistic. Musk hopes by making the panels visually attractive, they'll entice more homeowners to add them to their roofs.

They showed off four different types of tiles: terra cotta, slate, textured glass, and smooth glass.

They work like thousands of little solar panels all hooked together.

Image from Tesla.

They're basically mini-solar cells covered in a durable glass coating that will protect them from the elements. They can be designed to match different shapes and styles to fit the house.

The shingles will likely be out of reach for most homeowners at first. Tesla hasn't announced a price, but a similar product by Dow costs about $20,000 for a small patch of 350 shingles. Tesla's website does suggest that with the lower utility bills they'd end up paying for themselves, however, and government incentives could help too.

All that said, for now, they'll probably be similar to Tesla's first electric cars — a cool device for people who are really into new technology. But they could end up becoming more popular: Think of all the people driving electric cars now. And we have seen solar power in general get massively cheaper in the last few years, a trend that is likely to continue.

This is a neat example of how renewables could end up integrated into everyday life.

Right now we depend on just a few huge power plants, but in the future inventions like this — combined with more affordable energy storage options — could turn our homes, offices, and garages into mini power plants.

This could not only help us transition away from fossil fuels and toward more green energy, it could also be a lot cheaper and make the market more dynamic.

Which would probably make everyone more like this:

FEED ME ELECTRICITY, SUN, MNOM MNOM MNOM MNOM MNOM. Photo from iStock.

Did you know the very first Porsche ever designed was electric?

Ferdinand Porsche might have founded his famous car company in 1948, but he designed his very first car all the way back in 1898, when he was just 22 years old.


Imagine this chassis with two racks of seats on top and you'll see Porsche's vision. Image from Porsche.

Officially the 1898 Egger-Lohner electric vehicle, C.2 Phaeton, Porsche's first car is more affectionately known as the P1. Incredibly, it didn't need a single drop of gas — the P1 was powered by a small electric motor.

Yep, that's right. It was an electric car.

So yeah, electric cars are actually super old. Like, as old as cars themselves.

An electric car in England, 1896. Photo from Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The first practical electric car was invented in 1884, back when we as humans were still, you know, figuring out what the heck a car was.

In fact, by 1900, more than a third of all vehicles on the road were electric. (Gas-powered cars made up just 22%, and the rest were steam-powered.)

Just like today's electric cars, the electric cars of a century ago had some major advantages over early gas-powered vehicles.

Early gas cars were clunky, loud, and dirty. Worse, drivers had to physically wrestle with the car to get it to move — every gear shift or hand-cranked start-up involved essentially arm-wrestling an ornery, hateful robot.

Thomas Edison posing with an electric car, 1895. Photo by General Photographic Agency/Getty Images.

Electric cars, on the other hand, were easy to start, easy to drive, and quiet. They weren't exactly fast or long-range vehicles (they only went about 20 miles an hour), but this wasn't a problem in cities, where cars were primarily used. Plus the roads outside the city were pretty bad, and no one wanted to drive out there anyway.

These early electric cars had some major fans, too. The famous entrepreneur Thomas Edison backed electric cars, and even Henry Ford explored them as an option.

If electric cars had so many great benefits, why didn't they catch on? What went wrong?

Today, Texas is known for its gigantic crude oil production — but back around the turn of the century, we were just really starting to drill, baby, drill. Then, on Jan. 10, 1901, the Lucas No. 1 well in Spindletop blew its top, dramatically ushering in an era of cheap, readily available gasoline for America.

The Spindletop gusher, Jan. 10, 1901. Photo from John Trost/Wikimedia Commons.

In 1908, Henry Ford dealt a second blow to electric cars when he unveiled the gas-powered Ford Model T.

Largely thanks to Ford's use of an assembly line, the Model T was much cheaper than any other cars out there, costing only about a third as much as a comparable electric car.

A later model of the super-cheap Model T, the Model T Couplet, way back in 1914. Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Plus, with the advent of the highway system, people wanted fast, cheap, powerful cars that they could use anywhere.

It's hard to imagine now, but at the time we also just didn't have the infrastructure to support electric cars. Today, you can get electricity pretty much anywhere. Before 1910, however, a lot of urban homes weren't wired for electricity, meaning people couldn't charge their cars at home. And electric cars certainly weren't an option for anyone living in a rural area where electricity wasn't even a thing.

Weirdly, sexism may have also played a role in the success of gas-guzzlers.

Electric cars were cleaner and easier to operate, and were therefore often marketed specifically toward women — gaining a reputation as being a woman's car.

I wish I were joking. Image from Rmherman/Wikimedia Commons.

This may have scared men away from purchasing them, driving them to buy gasoline-powered cars and, ugh, history, really?

Anyway, between weird marketing stigmatization, the low cost of crude oil, the much more affordable Model T, and the introduction of the highway system, by the 1930s, electric cars were pretty much gone.

Today, though, the advantages to electric cars are largely the same — and a lot of the disadvantages are a thing of the past.

Electric cars of today are still cleaner and quieter than gasoline-powered vehicles, and we're quickly solving a lot of the issues like cost and driving range.

Electric cars have historically been more expensive, but both Tesla and Chevy have announced they'll be producing electric cars in the actually-kind-of-affordable $30,000 range. Plus we've learned that while gasoline has been cheap, our exuberance for burning it and other fossil fuels has been writing the entire planet a massive bill — to the tune of over $1.9 trillion a year by 2100.

That just leaves infrastructure for charging electric cars, which, it turns out, has been growing up right under our noses.

We're still lacking a lot of the infrastructure we'll need to make electric cars truly ubiquitous, but it's slowly starting to appear.

A Tesla Supercharger in Fremont, California. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images.

Tesla has been building a gigantic network of Superchargers, and ChargePoint claims to have more than 28,000 chargers ready for public use. Many non-car-related businesses like Walgreens are starting to provide charging stations in order to entice customers as well.

There are even services that let people with charging points at their homes rent them out to other electric car owners. One company, Fisker, even had an idea for a hybrid car that could charge via solar panels on the roof, meaning even needing to find a charging station may one day be a thing of the past.

To bring this story full circle, guess who's getting back into the electric car game?

That's right: Porsche.

A rendering of the Porsche Mission E concept car. Image from Porsche.

118 years after Ferdinand Porsche designed the P1, Porsche announced an electric car of its own: the Mission E. Originally just a concept car, Porsche has finally decided to put it into production.

Electric cars aren't a new fad — they're intimately tied to the very history of automobiles.

While there are some things they'll never do quite as well as gas-powered cars — like revving your engine before a big race — it's awesome to see that we might finally be entering an era where gas and electric cars are sharing the road again.

Last night, Tesla Motors' CEO Elon Musk unveiled their newest electric car — the Model 3. And the world went wild.

As of this writing, Tesla's already taken nearly 200,000 preorders in just 24 hours.




That's ridiculous, and they've even had to limit it to two cars per person. But why have so many people signed up for this awesome, emissions-free, world-saving car?

Well, for one, it's incredibly sexy.

From an ecological viewpoint, electric cars are really cool. The use batteries and electric motors instead of fossil fuels, which means they don't create carbon dioxide or airborne pollutants. But for a long time, they weren't the coolest-looking things on the road.

However, if your idea of green technology is something that looks like a glorified golf cart, this will blow your mind.


Image courtesy of Tesla Motors.

The car just looks awesome. And it comes with a lot of cool features too: the center console is a 15" computer screen that sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, the whole roof and rear windshield are a single sheet of glass, and it's got autopilot.

Autopilot!

But the big thing isn't just the look — it's the price tag too.

One of the huge drivers of Tesla's ridiculous first-day sales is definitely the price.

The base version of the Model 3 will sell for about $35,000, and Musk estimates that the average Model 3 will run about $42,000. Subtract from that the tax credit (up to $7,500) you might be eligible for from the government for buying an electric car and the total's really not bad, especially for a car this cool.

Image courtesy of Tesla Motors.

One of the big hurdles that a lot of green technology, like electric cars, has had to overcome is getting the price down to where regular people can actually afford it. Unfortunately, a lot of these earth-saving technologies have kind of been just for the 1%. Tesla's previous dream car, the Model S, started closer to $60-70,000, for example.

But this ... man — $35,000. I'm not rich, but I could afford that.

And Tesla's not the only company making a push for affordable green technology. The Chevy Bolt, another electric car due to debut next year, will also be in the I-don't-own-a-private-jet price range.

These preorder sales numbers prove something awesome — people really, reeeeally want green technology. You just have to give it to them.

Image courtesy of Tesla Motors.

This isn't a niche market. This isn't a trend. This is something people want and are passionate about. And it feels awesome to see companies dedicated to making Earth-saving, fossil-fuel-addiction-breaking technology really accessible to everyone.

Tesla's sales figures show that a green future isn't just possible, it's undeniable.

Watch Tesla's Model 3 unveiling: