Lifestyle
By Miles’ Tesla insurance service ensures fair coverage for UK-based EV owners
With one in ten cars now sold in the UK being electric, the revolution of the private transportation sector is undeniable. Electric cars are here, and at their forefront are tech-focused, always-connected vehicles like the Tesla Model 3, an EV that ranked among the UK’s most popular new cars in 2019. With this in mind, it’s essential that an always-connected and purpose-built insurance policy, specifically designed to cover these cars, exists. This is where UK-based insurance provider By Miles comes into the picture.
By Miles offers a unique, custom policy model for lower mileage Tesla drivers in the UK. The company has launched the world’s first connected car insurance policy which takes information about the distance driven directly from Teslas to work out how much premium to charge, eliminating the need to install any hardware or software in the car. The company’s concept is simple: Tesla owners are charged by the mile, regardless of how they drive their vehicles. Owners that drive under 7,000 miles a year could end up paying significantly less with a By Miles custom-built Tesla policy, compared to a more traditional car insurance policy.
“With a pay-by-mile policy from By Miles, the less you drive, the less you pay.”
Tesla owners are sure to enjoy the simplicity and features of a By Miles policy, which includes instant self-serve policy changes, a ‘Find My Car’ feature to help track down their Tesla if it’s stolen (or if they forget where they’ve parked) and much more. The setup process is all done online, allowing a Tesla owner to link their car to their By Miles account in seconds. The app also gives owners a transparent overview of their policy, allowing them to keep track of the miles they’ve driven each day. A By Miles connected car insurance policy also covers the battery and charging cable theft, as well as guaranteed repairs for five years using Tesla-approved garages. The policies are underwritten by experienced insurer La Parisienne Assurances, which is backed by Swiss Re.
Traditional insurers in the UK still have a long way to go when it comes to effectively insuring smart, electric cars like Teslas. Unlike Californian drivers, who currently have the option of getting covered by Tesla’s own insurance, owners in the UK are obliged to approach third-party providers for their vehicles’ coverage. Unfortunately, some of these providers haven’t updated their policies to take into account the smart safety features or technology offered by electric cars, resulting in unfair premiums that don’t fully cater to these high tech, high-powered cars.
In a press release, By Miles noted that a Tesla Model 3 could, at times, receive a £2,000 quote for their coverage in the UK, which is pretty steep, especially if you’re a lower mileage driver. With a pay-by-mile policy from By Miles, the less you drive, the less you pay.
“A fairer kind of car insurance. Purpose built for Teslas.” – By Miles
These outdated insurance policies regularly cause challenges for Tesla owners in Europe, such as a Model X owner whose vehicle was deliberately set on fire by vandals last year. Partly because the vehicle survived the incident and was still drivable despite being burned, the owner’s insurance provider denied declaring the Model X a total loss. This was despite a Tesla Service Center observing that the Model X’s cabin might already be compromised since chemicals from the cooling system seemed to have entered the interior. The Model X’s owner and the insurance provider are currently in a potential legal conflict.
James Blackham, the co-founder of By Miles, noted that the company aims to make car insurance fairer for Tesla drivers. “Our policy is the first connected car insurance policy in the world, and the first to offer pay-by-mile cover without the need for any external technology like a black box or smartphone. We’re going totally trackerless. Tesla drivers have been getting a raw deal on car insurance, mostly because the old fashioned big insurers don’t understand their cars. But we think Tesla owners should be rewarded for making an eco-friendly choice,” he said.
By Miles offers fully comprehensive car insurance that’s purpose-built for Teslas. To date, they’ve insured almost 30 million miles and are rated ‘Excellent’ on Trustpilot. They were voted the UK’s Best Car Insurance Provider in 2019 at the Insurance Choice Awards.
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Tesla owners interested in adopting By Miles’ Tesla insurance coverage can click here for a free quote.
An overview of By Miles’ Tesla insurance coverage could be found below.
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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