Lifestyle
Tesla owner drag battles Model 3 friend after Acceleration Boost upgrade
If there is one thing that Tesla never misses the mark on, it is its vehicles’ performance. If Elon Musk states that a car will go from 0-60 mph in 3.5 seconds, there is almost a certainty that the vehicle definitely will. The car may end up entering the market later than expected, but when it does, one can be sure that it would go as quick, or perhaps even quicker, than Tesla’s initial estimates.
This is why the company’s recently-announced paid Acceleration Boost Upgrade is so interesting. The upgrade costs $2,000, the first of its kind considering that all prior updates (including performance-oriented ones) have been free thus far. But this particular update is not the usual run-of-the-mill over-the-air optimization that Tesla has rolled out in the past. This paid Acceleration Boost Upgrade promises to cut a vehicle’s 0-60 mph time by half a second.
A 0.5-second reduction in 0-60 time is no joke. In a recent tweet, ARK Invest analyst Sam Korus noted that a half-second improvement in 0-60 mph times likely represents a boost of about 85 hp. According to the analyst, a comparable performance upgrade in an ICE car will likely cost over $4,000. It would also take a longer period of time considering the complexity of an internal combustion engine. In Tesla’s case, Model 3 Dual Motor AWD owners simply paid for the Acceleration Boost and the update was downloaded and installed on their vehicle.
Tesla Model 3 owner-enthusiast Chris of YouTube’s Dirty Tesla channel owns a Dual Motor AWD variant of the company’s all-electric midsize sedan. In a recent video, the YouTube host opted to test his car, which does not have the Acceleration Boost Upgrade, against another Dual Motor AWD Model 3 that has the performance-oriented update installed. The Model 3 owner met with a friend for some informal tests, and the results were very telling.
Initial 0-60 runs in the upgraded vehicle already showed an improvement in Tesla’s original rated times for Model 3 Dual Motor AWD. During one test, the boosted Model 3 even hit 60 mph in just 3.89 seconds. A similar run in the stock Model 3 resulted in a 4.5-second 0-60 time. That’s right around Tesla’s estimates, that’s with the test being conducted in the cold, and at a location that’s less than optimal. A drag race between the two Model 3s showed a dramatic improvement in performance for the upgraded vehicle.
It’s pretty impressive how Tesla is able to provide a significant boost to its vehicles through a simple software update. But in a way, the paid Acceleration Boost Upgrade for the Model 3 may very well be the first of many. Such updates, after all, would likely give Tesla a good amount of revenue, especially since it costs the company very little to release it to paying customers. Eventually, paid upgrades for other services such as premium games or streaming services may be introduced as well, helping Tesla’s bottom line.
Watch Dirty Tesla‘s Acceleration Boost Upgrade test in the video below.
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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.
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.
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.
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