Why Lab Tests Miss What Real-World Testing Catches: An Engineer’s Methodology | Taha Abbasi

The Gap Between Specification and Reality Every vehicle has two versions: the one that exists in controlled laboratory conditions, and the one that exists in your driveway. They’re rarely the same vehicle. As an engineer who specializes in real-world testing, I’ve built my methodology around this gap. Here’s why lab tests miss what matters—and how …

Exploring Utah’s Forgotten Mining Tunnel: An Overlanding Adventure | Taha Abbasi

Some Places Exist Only If You’re Willing to Find Them There’s a mining tunnel in Utah’s west desert that doesn’t appear on modern maps. No trail markers. No AllTrails listing. No YouTube videos. It exists in BLM records from 1912 and nowhere else. Finding it took three trips, two wrong canyons, and one memorable stuck …

The Cheapest V8 Tundra: Why Budget Builds Teach Better Engineering | Taha Abbasi

Why Budget Builds Teach Better Engineering I bought the cheapest running V8 Tundra I could find. Honestly, my ’94 Land Cruiser had just caught fire after sitting at a shop for two years, and I needed something reliable while I figured out next steps. What I didn’t expect was how much I’d learn from a …

Tesla FSD V14 Bike Rack Test: Does It Actually Work? | Taha Abbasi

The V13 Nightmare: Why I Stopped Using FSD with a Bike Rack When my wife Nichell and I got our mountain bikes this summer, we quickly discovered a problem. The moment we loaded them onto our hitch-mounted bike rack and engaged FSD, the Cybertruck drove “like a bat out of hell.” It almost ran into …

Tesla FSD Standard vs Mad Max Mode: Which Setting Actually Works Better?

If you’ve got Tesla FSD, you’ve probably noticed the driving profile options. In V13, we had three profiles: Chill, Standard, and Hurry. With V14, Tesla added two new profiles at the extremes: Sloth (the slowest) and Mad Max (the most aggressive). The full lineup now runs: Sloth, Chill, Standard, Hurry, Mad Max. After spending extensive …

Tesla FSD Profiles Explained: Sloth, Chill, Standard, Hurry & Mad Max — Which One Should You Use? | Taha Abbasi

By Taha Abbasi Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised offers five distinct driving profiles: Sloth, Chill, Standard, Hurry, and Mad Max. Each shapes how aggressively your Tesla navigates traffic, changes lanes, and manages speed. After months of daily driving with FSD across versions 12, 13, and now 14, I’m sharing my real-world experience to help you …

1800 Miles in a Cybertruck: Real Range, Charging, and What Tesla Won’t Tell You | Taha Abbasi

What Nobody Tells You About Long-Distance Cybertruck Ownership 1,800 miles. Four states. One Cybertruck named Kimosabi. And a question we needed answered: Could Tesla’s Full Self-Driving actually take us on a family road trip? This was our first road trip with an EV—a journey from Utah to Washington and back, with an overnight stop in …

We Couldn’t Survive on EVs Before Cybertruck | Taha Abbasi

We Weren’t Looking for an EV When Nichell and I moved to Utah, an electric vehicle was nowhere on our radar. We were deep in the off-road and overlanding world—I was building up a 1994 Land Cruiser, a passion project inspired by my father who passed away in 2018 after battling cancer for five years. …

Why Real-World Testing Matters: The Gap Between Lab Results and Road Reality

The automotive industry loves controlled environments. Test tracks with perfect asphalt. Climate chambers set to precise temperatures. Simulation software running millions of virtual miles. But here’s what decades of engineering experience has taught me: the real world doesn’t care about your lab conditions. As someone who has spent years building and testing frontier technology—from software …

How to Fully Remove a Stuck Lumina Virtual Camera on macOS

Taha Abbasi documents a real-world macOS edge case where Lumina’s official uninstall process removes the app but leaves the virtual camera active. This article explains the underlying macOS behavior and provides a safe, repeatable workaround that also applies to other virtual camera drivers.