Four years ago, a member of the United States Air Force put his puppy in the front trunk of his Tesla Model 3 and took a photo. It was a decision that ended up starting a movement that even Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his mother, Maye Musk, participated in: Frunk Puppy Friday.
The frunk trunk (frunk) of a Tesla and other EVs is where the engine would be in a typical internal combustion engine vehicle. Since Tesla doesn’t have an engine, the design team of the vehicles created a nifty storage space that is great for taking photos of pets. Other EV makers have followed suit.
The Frunk Puppy Friday movement is coming up on its four-year anniversary on August 18. Frunk Puppy Friday is a contest where EV owners put their pets in the frunks of their vehicles and take photos. Using the hashtag, #frunkpuppyfriday, they submit the photos to a Twitter contest. Every week, four photos are picked by the Frunk Puppy Board, and Twitter votes for the best one.
Interview with Dr. Earl Banning, the creator of Frunk Puppy Friday
It’s been four years of Frunk Puppy Friday and I asked Earl how felt about this upcoming anniversary.
“It’s pretty mind-blowing. As you know, I started to think about this idea after my wife’s brain hemorrhage and was in the hospital and it was just a real emotional time. People throughout the Tesla community were really helpful and being there over text messages, Twitter messages.”
Earl wanted to do something for the Tesla community back in 2018. Back then, Tesla was struggling, the short selling and the ensuing misinformation about Tesla were intense and Earl just wanted to do something positive to bring balance.
Fighting FUD and facing the possibility of losing his wife to a brain aneurysm
Earl was inspired to fight for Tesla and to take part in combatting all of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that was just continuous. And then the unthinkable happened. Earl’s wife had a brain aneurysm and almost died.
“There were a lot of short-sellers and there were a lot of people attacking everybody and Tesla wasn’t in great shape at times. It was a little rough.”
“I just didn’t feel like happy to argue. I needed something else. So what’s better than dogs and Teslas? I thought about how the frunk is special. So I was brainstorming and trying to figure out what I could do.”
“I like dogs so I put a dog in a frunk and came up with the word Frunk Puppy and it seemed to stick. And it wasn’t really until we were leaving the hospital after the second surgery that I put Norman in the frunk and took a picture.”
The moment when Frunk Puppy began to take off
Earl shared his photo with his friends on Twitter and encouraged them to join him in taking photos of their puppies in frunks.
“It was really Trevor Page from Model 3 Owners who put his cat in the frunk and tweeted it,” Earl told me. Back then Earl’s account wasn’t as large as it is now but Trevor’s was. Once Trevor took a frunk kitty photo, the movement took off and people began taking photos of their pets in their frunks.
“It blew up around the world. There were entries from China and all over Europe, the U.S., Canada, and then of course, Maye Musk by October. I developed it in August and by October–Halloween–she put her dog in the frunk and that’s when things went totally bananas.”
The Frunk Puppy movement began to take off so Earl began a contest. Many members of the Tesla community are also small business owners and were sponsoring prizes for the winners of the weekly poll.
“We had all these entries so I formed this little board of people to start voting on them. I wanted it to be a true democracy. I didn’t want to just pick it which I used to do. I wanted people to narrow it down to the top four and vote on Twitter.”
Frunk Puppy Is now 4 years old.
Earl expected the movement to eventually fade away as things do, but that isn’t happening anytime soon. The Frunk Puppy movement has become sort of a rite of passage for most EV owners who take photos of their pets in their frunks.
Earl told me that the board gets 40-50 entries per month and that people really appreciate it.
“If I’m late at putting the vote up on Friday, I start getting all these messages from people. ‘Where’s the poll? It’s all I look forward to,’ type of messages. So there are definitely people who appreciate it. Hundreds of people vote every week. And it’s very light-hearted.”
“I always imagined it to be very agnostic. I didn’t want it to be a Tesla-only thing. I wanted it to raise awareness for EVs. My hope at the time was that all EVs would have frunk. It’s a great way to start a conversation about EVs and it’s an infectious hashtag to really point out EVs, clean energy, and no emissions. And look, you can put your dog in where the engine should be and take a picture. I think that’s so cool.”
“Early on, we had winners who had Nissan LEAFs and that grew over time where Lucid wrote ‘#FrunkPuppy’ and posted a photo with a dog in their frunk on Instagram. This was pretty cool because the cars hadn’t even come out yet.”
A frunk fit for all our furry friends. #NationalPuppyDay #FrunkPuppy pic.twitter.com/W3ttmyo8Jd
— Lucid Motors (@LucidMotors) March 23, 2021
“Bollinger was a repeat winner many times in a row with their awesome frunk and Rivian has slipped right in. We had someone in the top 4 last week. We’ve had several Rivians now. But the Ford Lightning has really taken over. Two weeks ago, we had two of the top four with Ford Lightning. It’s just an enormous frunk. It’s perfect. People have dogs and trucks.”
How Earl felt when Elon Musk posted his Frunk Puppy Friday submission.
https://twitter.com/28delayslater/status/1446128079802286088?
Although Elon Musk didn’t use the hashtag #frunkpuppyfriday, with one tweet, Elon united the EV community, the Dogecoin community, and puppy lovers with one of the most adorable photos of a puppy in a frunk. I asked how Earl felt when Elon used something he created.
“I have a mug and it has three parts on it. The first part is Elon saying his dog’s name is Floki. The second one is of me saying ‘for the love of God put that dog in the frunk.’ The third part was him agreeing.”`
Floki Frunkpuppy pic.twitter.com/xAr8T0Jfdf
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2021
‘And then he did it. He wrote the word Frunk Puppy which is really funny because he’s like the richest guy in the world taking time to put his dog in a frunk and post it. And of course, Floki won that year. He won that week and the year.”
“It was so incredible that Elon had taken the time to do that. It was such a silly ask and then he sees my tweet and agrees. And then he actually does it on time. He did it when he said he would do it. I was really overwhelmed.”
Earl told me that EV owners across brands are submitting photos of their pets in frunks which is what he always wanted it to be.
The Future of Frunk Puppy
The way time has been flying, Frunk Puppy will be at its fifth anniversary. With that in mind, I asked Earl what he had in store for the future.
“I would like to have more participation across brands which I think will happen as more people buy EVs. I’m not a tech person and haven’t put the time into it, but one of my dreams is to take the voting off of Twitter and put it on my Frunk Puppy website because I feel like it’s a real disservice.
“You click the tweet and it’s such a tiny picture with poor resolution. What I would hope is that maybe even all of the pictures from the week are there and you just vote on the one you want. Or still do a top four but when you go onto the website you can see giant pictures. Some pictures are beautiful pictures but when you look at it on Twitter it’s lackluster.”
Earl also said he wouldn’t mind getting back to having prizes. When Covid-19 hit, a lot of small businesses suffered and closed down. He also said he would like to do more charity fundraisers. One issue he had with the prizes is that people wouldn’t want them. People were more interested in winning the Frunk Puppy Friday vote simply just to win.
The community of Frunk Puppy
Earl loves seeing all the pictures every week and he’s proud of the movement.
“It’s just so cool to me that people do that and they’re so creative. I see people continue to really have fun with it. Sometimes, as I said, Twitter can be a bit of a downer but you see such a playful creative side to people where they’re decorating the inside frunk or dressing up their dog. They’re really having fun with it and to me, that means a lot.”
Earl told me that some pet owners would tell him when their dog or pet died and he’d do a one last Frunk Puppy picture in their honor.
“I tear up a little bit. It’s pretty cool that they send these to me. Over four years, there’s a lot of dogs that have won who aren’t with us anymore and I’ll do a memorial tweet or video.”
Helping Pets In Need.
One thing that Earl has done with the Frunk Puppy movement was help pets in need. In fact, this community helped save both of my cats when I found myself suddenly a new kitty mom. Tesla, (yes his name is Tesla as I am a fan) was found when he was eight days old and I had to bottle feed him.
Peanut was brought to me by a neighbor who found her with glue poured all over her. Someone had not only put Peanut in a glue trap, but they tried to drown her in glue. We used an entire jar of peanut butter to get the glue out of her fur and it saved her life.
Earl told me that recently there was a cat found in a trash can with one eye. He needed surgery and that cat is fine now. It had the surgery, got adopted, and has a sibling with no eyes.
“Over the years I’ve used Frunk Puppy for charity. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I wish I could find ways to do that a little more formally because people are very generous and it’s a good awareness tool. Sometimes people will put a foster dog in their frunk and it gets a lot of tweets.”
“Another thing that I’m working on with Mother Frunker is that we’re going to take all the winners from the year and make a coffee table book. And then donate all the proceeds to charity. That’ll be the end of this year.”
The Frunk Puppy Friday movement has evolved over the past four years and is going strong. It’s inclusive for all EVs and all types of pets. Little Tesla was a winner when I submitted him in 2019.
Although I don’t own a car, Tesla friends often drive through Baton Rouge and this was the perfect opportunity for a Frunk Puppy Friday submission and a way to let the Tesla community know that the kitty they helped to save was doing fine.
Meet Little Tesla, a kitty who was abandoned by his mom at 8 days old. We didn't think her wpild make it. Frunk provided by @ChrisjonesLee #FrunkPuppyFriday #FrunkKittyFriday pic.twitter.com/n1OZYWKVI4
— Johnna (@JohnnaCrider1) November 15, 2019
Disclaimer: Johnna is long Tesla.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
Elon Musk
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Tesla certified three Chinese suppliers for Optimus mass production, signaling its robot timeline is accelerating.
Tesla’s robotics team traveled to Ningbo, in China’s Zhejiang province, on September 16 and spent the following day auditing component suppliers for Optimus, according to a Bloomberg report cited by RobotAIGeek. The visit moved three manufacturers from provisional status to certified mass production partners: Tuopu Group, which handles actuators and chassis components, Ningbo Joyson Electronic, a sensor supplier, and Zhejiang Sanhua Intelligent Controls, which builds thermal management systems. All three already supply parts to Tesla’s electric vehicles, and the audit reportedly came with fresh orders that supply chain reports put at an initial batch of roughly 5,000 units.
Tuopu, Joyson, and Sanhua built their manufacturing base serving the automotive industry, where tolerances and volume requirements are already close to what a mass produced humanoid robot demands. Sanhua in particular has history here. Teslarati reported last October that the company had received a roughly $685 million order for linear actuators tied to Optimus, a volume industry watchers estimated could cover around 180,000 robots once production ramped.
Supply chain reports tied to this week’s audit put Tesla’s near term production goal at about 1,000 Optimus units a week by late September, rising to 2,000 to 2,500 units a week by the end of the year. That pace would put real weight behind the timeline Tesla has been building toward since May, when it wound down Model S and Model X production at Fremont to convert that floor space into a dedicated Optimus line targeting one million units annually. JPMorgan analysts who toured the factory in August confirmed the conversion took roughly four months, a pace Musk has called unprecedented for a facility that size.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Fremont is only the first phase. A second, larger Optimus plant is rising at Gigafactory Texas, where drone footage shared by Joe Tegtmeyer last week showed the structural steel nearing completion on the north end of the building. Tesla has said that facility is meant to eventually support production of up to 10 million units a year, though volume output there is not expected before 2027.
Commercial sales of Optimus are still targeted for the second half of 2027, but production is expected to start well before then. JPMorgan analyst Rajat Gupta has said Tesla’s “Optimus Academy” program, which uses early units to collect real world training data inside Tesla’s own facilities, is expected to be running later this year. Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Ian Ma described the Ningbo audits as “a positive commercialization signal for China’s humanoid supply chain,” noting that sentiment could improve further if the visit leads to confirmed supplier nominations and larger orders. The Solactive China Humanoid Robotics Index rose about 1.4% on the news, though it remains down roughly 30% for the year.
Elon Musk
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Tesla is now shipping Cybercabs from Giga Texas with Starlink hardware built in as standard.
Tesla’s Cybercabs are now leaving Gigafactory Texas with Starlink hardware on the rear hatch in significant numbers, according to drone footage captured Tuesday by longtime Austin drone observer Joe Tegtmeyer. Production at the factory ramped back up after the Labor Day weekend, and his flyover of the outbound lot showed rows of gold Cybercabs alongside Model Y Long Wheelbase units, many carrying the satellite module for the first time as standard equipment rather than a one off retrofit.
Giga Texas today is busy with production coming back up following the long weekend. Of interest today in the outbound lot is the appearance of hundreds of Mode; YL’s and many more Cybercabs and for the 1st time equipped with the Starlink module one the hatch in big numbers.
At… pic.twitter.com/G9yl6s51m4
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 8, 2026
Tesla first showed Starlink built into an actual Cybercab on August 10, when the Robotaxi account posted images of a single gold unit with the antenna integrated into the roofline above the taillights and called it the first Cybercab with Starlink integration. That followed a July reveal where Tesla and Starlink jointly posted a cutaway diagram of the antenna placement without a working vehicle to back it up. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI software, said at the time that the connection isn’t required for the car to drive itself. It exists mainly for navigation, customer service and keeping tabs on the fleet.
Musk has made a different case in public. During Tesla’s Q2 earnings call, he said the company can’t afford robotaxis stranded in what he called “Bermuda Triangles of lack of cellular connectivity,” and he separately claimed on X that Starlink will eventually reach every Tesla built, calling it the only way to deliver high bandwidth to billions of vehicles. He has also pitched the antenna as an entertainment upgrade, telling riders they would be able to stream 4K video or play games during a trip.
The rollout has moved fast since. Robotaxi service opened to the public in Austin on September 3, and Cybercabs had already been spotted with Starlink hardware in Houston and near Miami International Airport in the weeks before Tuesday’s factory footage showed the module shipping at volume rather than on scattered test units. Whether the satellite link earns its keep is still an open question. Tesla’s unsupervised service currently runs in dense metro geofences in Texas and Florida, markets where cellular coverage is already strong, which is not where the rural dead zones Musk describes tend to show up.
Lifestyle
Tesla Cybertruck targets job site crews with new Tailgate Utility Track and Bed Gear Box accessory
Tesla launched a $350 tailgate track and a $985 lockable Bed Gear Box for Cybertruck.
Tesla’s Cybertruck team added two more items to the Tesla Shop, targeting job site crews and owners who use the truck bed for actual work rather than just showing it off. The official Cybertruck X account posted the Tailgate Utility Track and the Bed Gear Box within minutes of each other, part of a five item batch that also included a reflective jacket, a spray paint hat and an updated reflective tee.
The Tailgate Utility Track runs $350 and turns the folded down tailgate into another mounting surface. It’s a single aluminum track with a T-slot for sliding accessories and two L-track attachment points, plus two load stops included in the box. The pitch is straightforward: strap down oversized cargo, like lumber or a cooler, that hangs off the back of the bed without it sliding out mid-drive. It bolts onto the existing tailgate and works on every Cybertruck trim.
Tailgate Utility Trackhttps://t.co/PCAYXlFBvS pic.twitter.com/sCV2NVxf1W
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 3, 2026
The Bed Gear Box costs $985 and is a different kind of accessory. It’s a lockable aluminum storage box, 55.78 inches long, 19.8 inches wide and 7.79 inches tall, that mounts to the bed’s L-track rails and comes with two internal bins for smaller items. According to Tesla, at just over 57 pounds empty, it’s meant to stay in place rather than come in and out with each trip, giving owners a factory-fit alternative to loose totes for tools, recovery gear or emergency supplies. Tesla’s listing notes that Long Range and Dual Motor AWD Cybertrucks need the L-Tracks accessory installed separately before the Gear Box will mount, since L-tracks come standard only on certain configurations.
Tesla Cybertruck bed gear box accessory
Both accessories lean on the idea Tesla has been building toward since Elon Musk first described the Cybertruck’s third-party attachment strategy at the 2023 shareholder meeting, when he said the truck would ship with mounting points so outside companies, and Tesla itself, could keep adding gear without redesigning the bed. That’s the same L-track backbone underneath the tailgate shield and jumpseats Tesla launched last year, and the off-road armor package that arrived through the same X account in 2025.
Owners looking to round out the rest of the L-track ecosystem, cargo dividers, MOLLE panels, bed racks and similar gear, can find a wider range of options through our Cybertruck accessories collection.
Tesla eyes supply partners for Optimus mass production
Elon Musk’s next Uranium in Uranus merch is Boring Company’s weirdest tease yet
