Lifestyle
Tesla drivers are finding shameless Supercharger ICE treatments in China
Tesla drivers in China are receiving the ICE treatment: the act of gas-powered cars parking in charging spaces reserved for electric vehicles.
A common practice among the anti-EV supporters in the world, ICEing is a way to prevent Teslas and other electric cars from plugging into chargers. Commonly, ICEing is performed as a protest against the EV movement, and it is rarely an occurrence that takes place because of a lack of available parking spots.
First seen at the beginning of the introduction of mainstream EVs, ICEing has become an illegal act in many U.S. States and other areas worldwide. Perpetrators of the act of trolling are usually subjected to hefty fines that can exceed $125. That’s an expensive practical joke.
However, Chinese drivers of electric vehicles are feeling the effects of ICEing now. While this is not the first occurrence of the act in the Asian country, it may be the most recent. Tesla enthusiast @JayInShanghai shared a video showing multiple gas-powered vehicles occupying Tesla Supercharger spots. Owners of BMWs, Hyundais, and Toyotas all purposely parked in several EV charging spaces. The owners of these vehicles also did a double whammy to EV owners by double-parking.
Selfish ICE car owners are Ice-ing Tesla owners from Supercharging in China 🇨🇳 even with the floor lock solution. Any other solution for this? @teslacn #Tesla #Supercharger #ICEing #China #FirstWorldProblems #特斯啦 #中国 $TSLA pic.twitter.com/yov4xzLnFX
— Jay in Shanghai 电动 Jay 🇨🇳 (@JayinShanghai) October 9, 2020
Meanwhile, an innocent Model X sits just outside of the spaces, waiting for the opportunity to regain range before embarking on a new journey.
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Unfortunately, the act of ICEing does nothing but make life inconvenient for two people. The owner of the EV is forced to wait for a charging space, and the owner of the gas-powered car is usually given a fine.
EV owners are no stranger to harassment from those who are stuck on gas and diesel-powered cars. ICEing is among many popular techniques used by ICE drivers; coal rolling is one of the other more notable pranks pulled on the environmentally friendly cars.
Teslarati has reported on other occurrences of ICEing in the past, including an incident in Germany, where the owner of a large Ford pickup was greeted by the Berlin Police Department and a tow truck. Another incident involved a Ford Mustang and a middle finger.
Tesla Supercharger-blocking Ford Mustang gets towed after driver flips off Model 3 owner
Tesla has developed some preventative measures, like a “ground lock” that essentially blocks gas cars from entering a Supercharger space. However, the garage in the aforementioned video equipped these, but the gas car drivers just pulled in between them.
Other solutions are likely needed to prevent these incidents from occurring in the future. While one of the simplest solutions is to create more laws and harsher penalties for perpetrators, this strategy has not prevented ICEing incidents from happening. It appears that the only real solution to eliminate the problem altogether is to eliminate gas cars completely. Buy a Tesla instead.
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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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![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner-80x80.jpg)
