Lifestyle
Top 5 ideas on how to alleviate Tesla Supercharger congestion [Poll]
In a perfect world of shiny, happy, Tesla folks just knowing and practicing good etiquette would alleviate Supercharger congestion. But as we hear at least once every major travel holiday, some locations do experience congestion. To add to my previous post on 5 rules for proper use of the Tesla charging network, here are 5 ideas for how to alleviate Supercharger congestion that Tesla could themselves take.
1 – Supercharger Valet Service
An idea that is not as obvious, but that already been thought of, is to employ attendants at busy locations. This attendant can easily serve as a valet, moving cars when they have reached their desired state of charge. More than that, the attendant can serve as a psychological reminder that ‘hey, these chargers are in demand, so I’d better take only what I need and move along.’ From my understanding, the current model dictates that the attendant not act as a valet, meaning they do not take keys or move cars. Expanding this idea to allow it could certainly help to alleviate any congestion that is caused by users not getting back to move their cars by the time they have reached their desired state of charge.
Below is an example of how Tesla has partnered with Luxe to provide on-demand valet service. Surely this could be something they could also incorporate at Supercharger locations.
On-demand @luxevalet for #Tesla spotted in Santa Monica – https://t.co/DiiD2BKtW2 pic.twitter.com/tCF3ULW4N9
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 9, 2016
2 – Have Dedicated “Express” Charging Stalls
I certainly can’t take credit for this, as I’ve heard it mentioned on the Tesla forums, but one idea is to dedicate a number of stalls as express stalls. These express stalls would include clear signage that indicates a time limit. 20 minutes, for example, could mean that those who intend a quick charge use those stalls specifically and those who need a quick charge wait in line for the express stalls. This would require an honor system, which certainly has its drawbacks, but again could serve as a psychological reminder that there is a demand for use here and occupying a space longer than you need it may inconvenience others.
3 – Publish Peak Usage Times
Speaking of Tesla’s plethora of data, they could also publish peak days and times for each Supercharger location. Memorial Day Weekend trips to the beach or the lake should go without saying, but certainly it can’t hurt for folks to be able to look up the busiest times for charger locations they plan on using. If you learned that a one hour adjustment to your travel plans would likely avoid a wait for a charger, you may very well adjust. Spreading out use away from peak times could benefit everyone.
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Tesla Model X charging during off-peak hours at the Oxnard, CA Supercharger
4 – In-navigation Communication
Not to forget Tesla’s incredible OTA software updates and software prowess in general, let us consider in-navigation communication to other owners. That is, once the car knows you are parked very close to a Supercharger, there is an ability for you to answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ to the simple question of whether or not the stalls are all in use. If you select ‘Yes’ those currently plugged in will get a notification on their app that says others are waiting to charge. This notification needn’t be any more complex than the one that notifies you that you have enough charge to move on. I’m not even talking about enforcement here, just information that the receiver can choose to use or ignore. I’ve only ever encountered a full 8-stall location once. When I plugged in, there were at least 5 open stalls. When I returned to my car (a reasonable charging time later) all were full. No one was waiting but it goes to show how quickly a wait could have formed. Someone who takes longer to get back to his or her car because the location seemed empty may very well rush right back if they found out it was full.
5 – Build More Superchargers
And last but not least, building more Superchargers is no doubt the most obvious solution. Tesla has done an excellent job of this, with 266 locations open in the United States as of June 1, 2016 and 18 under construction. Many major routes have been enabled, which speaks to the oft-repeated premise that the charging network is meant to enable long distance travel. “Freedom,” as Elon described it in the 2016 shareholders meeting, is the ability to go anywhere and not be tethered to your charging location.
Real-time Tesla Supercharger monitor at the Hawthorne Design Center in Southern California
What’s less obvious is what I mean by building more. One of Tesla’s many competitive advantages is data. Fleet learning with Autopilot is a great example. We already know that the company has insight on which chargers get the most use. Logic says expand those locations, just as they have in Newark, Delaware. I implore they take it one step further and make use of a precious resource: current owners. Send a quick email to every owner who charged in Cabazon, CA this weekend, for example, and ask where they traveled to and from. Make the email a very easy-to-complete survey and leave an open comments space for location suggestions. It may not be practical to add more stalls at some of the most popular locations, but maybe there is another location along the same travel route that can be built.
Which of these options sounds good to you? Take the poll below to see what others are voting on:
https://twitter.com/ElectricJen/status/738185172277952517
Feature image courtesy of Dennis Pascual via Flickr
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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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