Lifestyle
Scoring an Invite to the Model 3 Unveiling
For months I have been half joking about scoring an invite to the Model 3 unveiling event by becoming a “famous” YouTube star. In fact, I started wondering how I could pull this off before Tesla even announced details, and without knowing much about how Tesla handled invites for other events. When the D event was announced, our Model S was on order but I hadn’t yet experienced the buzz surrounding events as an official enthusiast. Most of this joking was made on the Forum section of the Tesla Motors website. In fact, on January 8th, this post was started, shouting into the void in case anyone from Tesla management was listening. A fellow forum user was cheering me on, despite none of us at the time really knowing how one would be able to be invited, outside of making 10 or more qualified sales in the second referral contest.
On March 15th, Tesla announced official details about the upcoming Model 3 unveiling event. It would be held at 7pm on March 31st in the Los Angeles area and be an ‘intimate’ event. To show appreciation to existing owners, a lottery system would be used to fill 650 of the fewer than 800 spaces available for the event.
As soon as the email inviting owners to register for the lottery came through, I urged my husband that we should do it. He worried what would happen if we actually got selected, and was convinced it would happen. We had plans to take off work and arrive at our local service center bright and early to make our reservation for a Model 3. I want nothing more than to get it as soon as possible to be rid of our second car – my ICE Hyundai – and planned to reserve as early as physically possible.
In the hours and day to follow, I started to get nervous. ‘What if we get selected?’ I thought. That would mean an unexpected trip, un-budgeted airfare, and missing the chance to reserve in store the minute it opens. I can’t say whether or not I officially regretted entering the lottery at that moment, but I knew that in the extremely unlikely event of getting selected, I’d have a lot of thinking to do.
March 17th came and went without hearing anything. There was not yet any chatter about owners getting selected by the time I went to sleep on the East Coast and I assumed the word would come down overnight. By the time my alarm sounded at 6:30am, my better half was already nearly done his workout at the gym. He sent me this email, “Obviously we need to chat ….”
Yes, it happened. Just as he predicted it would, we got selected to attend the event. I squealed a little. I jumped out of bed. I ran right to my computer and for reasons unbeknownst to me at this moment, I posted a video of my face sharing in the excitement.
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I texted my husband the words “Yes, yes, yes!” I started searching flights. To be honest I had already searched flights and saved an itinerary two days prior which would get us a direct flight at a semi-reasonable price. Back in January, I took first place in one of my fantasy football leagues. $281 in winnings were set aside “just in case” I had a plane ticket to buy in late March. This was supposed to be the week I spent it on something stupid, since by now I’d know that there was no chance I would be at the Model 3 event.
$860. Each. That was the price of the exact flight that was only five-something two days earlier. No way that was going to work. I started to realize that in the few times I had searched flights for the day, anything under $600 was pretty rare, unfortunately. Flights are meant to be booked well in advance and we just didn’t have that luxury.
Maybe we should drive to LA. Shoot, I’m going to be late for work. I drove the whole way with my head buzzing trying to figure out how best to get my butt to LA in two weeks. “We’re still young, we can do this”, I thought. It’s probably only two days of driving. Per the EV Trip Planner, it’s 55 hours each way. Wait, that’s not going to work. There were only 24 hours in a day last time I checked, and we’d need to sleep. (I googled a notable EV cross country trip and realized they had three drivers, took turns sleeping, and had more backup drivers following in an ICE. It took meticulous planning.)
For a few hours I took a mental break. Little did I know the Mister was at searching flights. Once he told me about one he found, a feeling of urgency started setting in. My tone got a bit frantic and I ended up booking before he could give me his blessing.
Breathe. We’re going. What’s $1056 at a time like this? This is the beauty (downfall?) of credit cards, I don’t really have to think about it until the due date next month. In my mind tens of thousands of owners signed up for a chance to be at this event and passing up on an RSVP (that we volunteered for) wasn’t an option.
What about my plans to reserve in store at the first possible moment? I’ll be in the air. There are no scenarios where I can be at a store (even one in California) anywhere near the first hour. I called my local service center and asked for someone in sales to call me back.
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“I understand you have a question about reserving a Model 3.”
“I promise you won’t have gotten this question from anyone yet. Wanna bet? No, that’s stupid, let me just tell you… I planned on coming by and waiting around, maybe bringing coffee and donuts to hang out with you guys and place my deposit at the first possible moment. But I can’t. I’ll be in the air. On my way to Hawthorne!”
A very pleasant and supportive voice congratulated me. He reminded me that owners would be prioritized over non-owners. I told him of my crazy theory that even reserving at the event, 9 hours after in-store reservations started, could mean 6 months or more of production wait. He chuckled and mentioned getting roughly 15 visits or phone calls every day last week asking about reserving. And that’s in Pennsylvania, where only a previous few EV owners live.
Reservation worries aside, I’m pretty pumped about the event. Do you have any speculation about what to expect? Or for that matter, what the dress code will be? Let me know in the comments section!
See recent posts from Electric Jen.
More Tesla Model 3 News
Firmware
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla’s Summer Update lets owners join Google Meet, Teams, and Discord calls via cabin camera.
Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, which just began rolling out to customer vehicles, now links the built-in web browser with the in-cabin camera feed and microphone input, thereby letting owners join video calls on nearly any browser-based service instead of just Zoom.
The change appears in Tesla’s own release notes for software version 2026.26 under “Web Browser,” which states that the vehicle can now use its interior camera and cabin microphone when a website requests access, with permission granted the same way a desktop browser handles it. As NotATeslaApp notes, this feature opens the door to Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Discord, and other webcam-enabled sites to activate the in-car cabin-facing camera. The feed automatically crops and zooms to center the driver in frame.
Tesla has offered in-car video calling before, but only through a dedicated Zoom app that launched at the end of 2022, a stripped-down browser preloaded with Zoom’s own web client and gated behind Premium Connectivity. Opening the full browser to any camera-requesting site removes that walled garden. Elon Musk first called video conferencing “definitely a future feature” back in 2020, when the pandemic pushed remote meetings into daily life, so this update effectively finishes something Tesla has been promising for six years.
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
The feature keeps the same restrictions that applied to Zoom on Tesla vehicles. It only works while the car is parked; shifting into Drive disables the camera feed, according to the release notes. It is also limited to vehicles running Tesla’s AMD Ryzen infotainment hardware, meaning older Intel-based Model S and Model X units, along with early Model 3 and Model Y builds, don’t get it.
Turning the browser into a general entry point for the in-cabin camera, rather than routing everything through one local app, widens the number of third-party sites that can ask for access, even though Tesla’s permission prompt.
With the Summer update only days into its rollout, be sure to stay with us on TikTok and X to see the latest video demonstrations.
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Elon Musk escalated his monthslong feud with Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey this week, pledging that his own AI video tool will produce a competing version before the year is out. Responding to a fan-made, AI-generated clip of the ancient epic, Musk wrote on X, “Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
In June, Musk quoted an xAI-shared trailer built entirely with Grok Imagine Video 1.5, a two-minute-plus reimagining of The Odyssey styled after a 1970s classical Hollywood epic, and predicted “full movies by the end of the year,” as Teslarati reported at the time. That trailer, built from 36 consistent shots by a single creator, was Musk’s proof of concept. This week’s pledge turns that prediction into a specific commitment, tied directly to Homer’s text rather than a generic demo.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
When a fan separately proposed that Musk fund a live-action alternative, to “give Mel Gibson $100 million to film an Odyssey adaptation with painstakingly historically accurate ships, armour, weapons, and casting, with all dialogue taken straight from the original poem and delivered in Homeric Greek,” Musk replied with two words: “I’m down.”
The Grok Imagine pledge lands as the tool’s underlying infrastructure has changed hands. Grok is no longer a standalone product, it folded into SpaceXAI after SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI closed in February, meaning the compute behind any Odyssey production traces back to the same Colossus supercomputers now bundled into SpaceX’s pitch to investors. Musk has separately said SpaceX’s own engineering data is being fed into the next major Grok training run, a two trillion parameter model he’s called the “2T run.”
Whether Grok Imagine can sustain a feature length narrative, rather than a series of impressive individual shots, remains the open question.
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Cybertruck
Tesla Mobile App gets a new feature that wrap fans are going to love
Tesla’s Summer Update removes the USB drive step from customizing your car’s digital wrap design.
Tesla’s latest 2026 Summer Update quietly closes out one of the more tedious steps in personalizing a Tesla’s digital appearance. Uploading a custom wrap design used to require a USB drive. Now it doesn’t.
The feature is listed in Tesla’s release notes as “Send Custom Wraps from Mobile App.” The company described it plainly: “Skip the USB drive and upload a custom wrap of your car from the mobile app. Instructions for creating a custom wrap here: github.com/teslamotors/custom-wraps.”
The digital wrap tool has been around since Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, when it launched for Cybertruck owners first, as Teslarati reported at the time. Getting a design onto the car meant formatting a USB drive, creating a folder named exactly “Wraps,” dropping in PNG files sized between 512×512 and 1024×1024 pixels and under 1 MB each, then plugging the drive in and applying the wrap through Toybox. Tesla expanded the tool to other models and renamed it from “Colorizer” to “Paint Shop” with the 2025 Holiday Update, while also adding license plate and window tint customization alongside the wraps.
Custom wraps via mobile app https://t.co/5OydZ26g9p pic.twitter.com/uexU0ZePxu
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
The latest Summer Update removes the USB step from that process. Owners will be able to pull a design from wherever they saved it, whether that’s a download from social media or something built from Tesla’s own GitHub templates, and push it to the car directly through the app.
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
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It’s a small fix relative to the rest of this latest release, which also included expanded Grok voice commands, automatic navigation that learns regular routes, and self-driving stats inside the mobile app, all detailed in our rundown of the full Summer Update. The USB requirement was one of the more common complaints about Paint Shop since it launched. Tesla did not say when the wrap upload change would reach individual vehicles, only that the broader update is rolling out now in waves.
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