Lifestyle
Tesla Roadster 10 Yr Anniversary: A Trip Down Memory Lane
Ten years ago, the Tesla Roadster was first introduced to the public. How far the world of electric cars has come since then. Where will it be ten years from now?
It’s been nearly a decade since the first unveiling of the Tesla Roadster, the car that started the electric car revolution. Tesla began in the mind of Martin Eberhard, an engineer at Wyse Technologies. He and Marc Tarpenning joined forces in 1997 to create NuvoMedia, a company working on digital reading devices. In 2000, they sold the company to Gemstar TV Guide for $187 million. Three years later, they would start Tesla Motors after obtaining funding through a variety of sources, and appoint Eberhard as the company’s CEO. The most notable investor of them all would be a young entrepreneur by the name of Elon Musk, cofounder of PayPal, who became the controlling investor in Tesla, funding the large majority of the Series A capital investment round with personal funds.
Though more of an investor and Chairman on Tesla’s Board of Directors at the time, Musk still took an active role within the company and oversaw Roadster product design at a detailed level. Musk led design of the Roadster’s carbon fiber body, power electronics module, and many of the components that would eventually be used in Tesla’s first production electric vehicle.
Although the cast of characters leading the company has changed over the past 10 years, the idea that unified their efforts has not — showing the world how to stop using fossil fuels for transportation. At the unveiling, Elon Musk was already talking about global warming, a topic that received very little attention at the time.
Tesla CEO Eberhard told Autoblog in 2006, “You can have a car that’s quick or you can have a car that’s electric, but having one that’s both is how you make electric cars popular.” That popularity was the key ingredient missing from every other electric car at the time, most of which were nothing more than glorified golf karts.
Making electric cars that are cool, cars that real people look forward to driving, is the foundation Tesla Motors is built upon. Does the world really need an electric sedan that can accelerate to 60 mph in less than 3 seconds? No, of course not. But the buzz that car creates is one of the elements that drives Tesla’s success.
That video from 10 years ago contains other messages as well. It illustrates how rapid the pace of change in electronics and digital technology has been. Could anyone imagine back then that cameras would be good enough to enable self driving automobiles just a decade later? And whatever happened to Netscape?
Elon Musk would become Tesla’s new CEO in October 2008. There were some bumps and bruised egos on the road that led from the Tesla Roadster to the Model X, but the dream hasn’t changed. What Elon Musk brought to the table was not only the ability to dream, but also the commitment to meticulous planning needed to make those dreams a reality.
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Related Tesla Roadster 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.
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
