Rivian has been on the move with publicity efforts surrounding a specialized kitchen set designed for their R1T truck’s gear tunnel that was unveiled at this year’s Overland Expo West in Flagstaff, Arizona. Several posts focused on the accessory have been published online recently to help jog potential customers’ imaginations and perhaps inspire a trip or two of their own with food at the forefront. It’s not just an idea being used as a photo prop, either. Rivian has confirmed the kitchen set will be available for sale when its R1T truck and R1S SUV are also hitting the market.
Shortly following the kitchen prototype’s debut, Rivian sent two company team members out on a Memorial Day overland trip to Sedona with the R1T wherein the portable dining station was put to use in the real world. Photos from the journey were subsequently shared via Rivian’s official social media, complete with Arizona’s red dirt and incredible mountain landscape in view. It’s probably safe to say the promo was successful in convincing audiences that the gear tunnel kitchen is a pretty cool accessory to have.
The R1T’s retractable kitchen includes two induction burners, cookware, utensils, and a sink with 5 gallons of water storage to both prep meals with and wash dishes. As demonstrated by Rivian’s Memorial Day road trippers, a ready-made way to cook up onions and peppers to enjoy with avocado and a desert sunrise definitely looks to be a scene that most of Rivian’s primary audience would enjoy. Overall, it’s a creative and convenient way to really tap into all the extra space Rivian’s flagship truck has to offer.
The debut of the kitchen accessory at an event like the Overland Expo makes sense for Rivian’s brand as well as an overland trip with the set itself. After all, overlanders are a creative bunch that embrace all the vehicle-supported living concepts they can imagine to get the most out of their travel experiences, and Rivian is promoting an electric adventure lifestyle in its product development and marketing. The company has also noted that the Overland Expo inspired its vehicle designs, and team members have attended prior expos to help fine tune their products to what future owners would be looking for.
Rivian’s gear tunnel itself gets a lot of coverage these days, and rightly so. Since the R1T doesn’t need to make room for all the extra parts needed for gas and diesel-powered engines, there’s tons of extra space for cargo, and a storage area separate from the truck bed provides the best of both traditional worlds for backend vehicle storage. The bed is great for hauling, as expected, and the gear tunnel is great as a “regular” trunk for things that are better suited to a more contained environment. The added convenience of using the gear tunnel’s door as a seat or stool is a bonus, and a significant one at that.
With the debut of the portable kitchen set, it looks like the Michigan-based startup has decided to tap into gear tunnel enthusiasm in the form of an add-on available direct from the factory. Albeit, with as creative as Rivian’s designs seem to be already, the aftermarket will probably fill up with numerous crazy and/or useful concepts that might be difficult to even imagine right now.
As Rivian’s brand expands, so will its loyalty and audience seeking custom parts and accessories, something that other auto makers with similar marketing focuses like Jeep have fostered over the years. Considering the highly visual and product-centric marketing efforts Rivian has already undertaken, a bright future of inspired utilization definitely looks to be ahead.
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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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.
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.
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
