Welcome to a FREE preview of our weekly exclusive! Each week our team goes ‘Beyond the News’ and handcrafts a special edition that includes our thoughts on the biggest stories, why it matters, and how it could impact the future.
You can receive this newsletter along with all of our other members-exclusive newsletters, become a premium member for just $3/month. Your support goes a long way for us behind the scenes! Thank you.
—
The recent headlines about Dyson’s abandoned efforts at making an electric car were probably music to the EV-doubter crowd’s ears. I assume this not so much because the Rolls Royce of vacuum companies had difficulty transitioning into a completely different industry, but because of the reason given for the shut down:
“However, though we have tried very hard throughout the development process we simply can no longer see a way to make it commercially viable.”
Sure, the jokes are funny. (“I guess they ‘sucked’ at making cars,” etc.) But the dissenters will point to this as yet another example of why the long-term prospects of EVs are overestimated by a long shot. No amount of regulations can fix the business-case and economic fact that there’s a huge cost obstacle to manufacturing battery-electric vehicles that can only bring the price down so much. Even Elon Musk has commented about this, saying something along the lines of how he doesn’t hate cheaper cars; they’re just not possible to make right now.
Quite possibly the biggest obstacles to widespread EV adoption is the affordability factor (the other being supply chain limiting production capability). While Tesla is obviously working on this aspect and some might argue they’re already there with a $35k Standard Range Model 3 (downgraded post-purchase), it really seems like it’s going to be an issue for a long time for companies other than Tesla. In other words, Tesla will probably figure out mass market, cheap cars way quicker than their competitors and stay ahead of the game for years if not decades. Is that a win for the movement, though?
To be perfectly honest, I’m a market principles person. My favorite part about Tesla (and SpaceX) was how a customer-driven approach was taken to revolutionize an industry (or two) after the government-driven approach had been wanting at best. The myths about EV ownership don’t exist in a vacuum (sorry, I had to). They came from a history of compliance EVs that were produced to merely meet requirements and not a bit of innovation more. For people that can’t afford a Tesla, it doesn’t matter that the company has achieved amazing things with their product. Their perspective is somewhat like scrolling through various celebrity Instagram accounts: How nice for them!
If Tesla wants to lead a movement of battery-powered vehicles on a global scale, someone has to be able to keep up. Right? Porsche seems to be on the right track, but they’re even less affordable than a Tesla and have always only sought to appeal to a niche luxury market. It seems to me that the issue is something beyond the tech itself, considering Tesla has “open sourced” its patents. What is it? What is driving huge companies with huge resources to fail at even creating a Tesla-level vehicle circa 2012?
I do think it’s a bit lazy to blame it on oil profits. If EVs made as much business sense for those “gasoline/diesel-centered” companies as it does for Tesla, they’d convert in a heartbeat. That’s the bit about markets that you can usually rely on. If there’s money to gain, there are players waiting to cash in. Also, there will be a market for oil companies for a long time due to manufacturing needs, and their investors are perfectly willing to diversify their portfolios with other things that make good money.
Or maybe that’s it in itself? Once Tesla has the cost-ratio figured out, the other players will follow along and start investing serious money in repeating that success. But what if that’s not it? How committed can Tesla be to its own movement if no one can catch up? Do others need to catch up? Will “good enough” be enough for global EV adoption with Tesla always representing the luxury segment of the market?
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
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.
Elon Musk
Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat
Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.
Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.
One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions
What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.
As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.
If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.
Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
Lifestyle
NTSB findings on fatal Tesla crash tell a very different story
The NTSB confirmed the driver, not Tesla’s FSD, caused the fatal Texas house crash.
The National Transportation Safety Board released preliminary findings Wednesday confirming that a Tesla driver, not the vehicle’s software, caused a fatal crash in Katy, Texas in June. The driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, had engaged Full Self-Driving Supervised mode on Rose Hollow Lane, a residential street with a 30 mph speed limit, before manually overriding the system by pressing the accelerator pedal all the way to 100%. Data recovered from the 2025 Tesla Model 3 showed the vehicle was traveling over 70 miles per hour when it struck a home and killed 76-year-old Martha Avila, who was inside. Weather was clear, the road was dry, and it was daylight.
Texas man charged in fatal Tesla crash where he blamed Autopilot
Butler told authorities he had passed out at the wheel. But security camera footage obtained by the NTSB told a different story, and showed the car accelerating through an intersection before leaving the road entirely. Police also found that Butler’s phone had Google searches including the terms “Tesla FSD not aggressive enough 2026” and “Tesla FSD too timid,” raising serious questions about how he was using the system before the crash. Butler has since been charged with manslaughter. The victim’s family has filed a lawsuit against both Butler and Tesla, alleging negligence.
The NTSB findings aligned directly with what Tesla VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy had already stated publicly on X in the weeks after the crash, writing that “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%.” The data confirmed his account.
Yup. In this case, the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area. They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash, and had the accelerator pressed even after the crash.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) June 22, 2026
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla is about to make parking in busy lots less stressful than ever
