Lifestyle
When Tesla ideas go mainstream… again
There are times in life where you have a lightbulb moment, so to speak, where suddenly a new way of doing things seems obvious. A month doesn’t seem to go by where Tesla isn’t doing some form of that to the auto industry.
First, it was electric cars. Against all odds, Tesla has proven that electric cars can be beautiful, compelling, practical and fast, all at once.
Next, it was over the air updates. A car that gets better over time? Unfathomable. Same goes for their off-cycle upgrades. A car company that doesn’t work in model years? Absurd!
Then, in what’s probably the least likely of Tesla’s practices to be copied, it was not making parts and service a profit center. While traditional dealers make a majority of their profits from these areas, Tesla chooses not to. Insanity!
Tesla also built out their own refueling infrastructure. Making it free or low cost is just not something anyone ever pictured with regards to the auto industry. Outside of gimmicky “free gas for a year” promotions, it’s just unheard of.
There are many more: the effective use of social media, the refusal to pay for traditional advertising, not paying sales folks on commission, online ordering, built-to-order cars, up front pricing, and many more. All of these items on their own amount to mosquito bites on the bare skin of other automakers. This small, once thought insignificant start up from California had no chance in their deeply entrenched good ole’ boys club. Except, that’s just not true anymore. 250,000 reservation deposits in two days for a new car proves it. Tesla is here to stay and has changed the course of how other companies in the auto industry will have to operate to stay alive.
In fact, I got a surprising email from a major auto insurance company recently. The subject was “About those driver’s-assist features you love.” The content provided some great and practical advice to using them, reminding drivers to provide the brains and not to fall into the trap of say, failing to check your blind spot just because your car has blind spot detection. That advice however, wasn’t what I noticed first. “Tesla did this,” I thought to myself, before I even read the content of the email. Tesla has brought attention to the lightening-fast march of car technology so much so that a major insurer felt compelled to talk to customers about it.
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Speaking of insurers, Tesla wants to go there too. Place another checkmark in the column of industries Tesla is stepping on the toes of. They can get in line behind ride-sharing giants, since Tesla has also mentioned ride sharing in their Master Plan Part 2. Which reminds me that the airline industry may also take a hit.
My personal favorite change, however, is the car dealership experience. The current model is obsolete. No matter how well prepared I was, how keen to their tricks, how adamantly against being sold an extended warranty, it still took me three whole hours to help a neighbor buy a car recently. It took at least that long to buy our last Jeep and longer than that to buy my first new car, a Scion. I just want to do some research, narrow down choices, go for a test drive, then buy a darn car. I don’t care if it takes weeks to get, as long as those weeks are spent at home doing my own thing and not sitting in an uncomfortable dealership filled with stale pretzels and fluorescent lighting. I don’t want to haggle. I especially don’t want my intelligence insulted by being shown monthly payment terms that hide the fact that your first offer was actually $9,000 over MSRP. (I’m talking to you, Jeep.) I have a calculator. Actually, I have a printed out spreadsheet that shows my monthly payments for 10 different price points and 3 different interest rates since I know you insist on negotiating in monthly payment terms rather than total purchase price. I’m a dealership’s worst nightmare. But it doesn’t need to be that way. Tesla proves it. Scion claimed they did – pure pricing they called it. I knew wherever I shopped, my 2008 tC was going to cost me exactly $18,400. It still took me all day to buy that car. Buying my Model S was a joy.
And now, a couple hundred thousand of my closest friends are about to experience that same joy. Actually, they may experience something better. Tesla appears to be trying to best themselves by providing a 5-minute delivery model. After all, Tesla doesn’t discriminate when it comes to who they show up when they decide they’ve found a better way, they just do it.
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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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