Lifestyle
[Video] TESLARATI 48 Tesla Finishes 2nd in Laguna Seca EV Race Competition
Our 48 Tesla has finished 2nd at Laguna Seca in an EV time trial (TT) competition among 24 Model S and Tesla Roadster in the Production GT group.
The competition was organized by Speed Ventures through the annual REFUEL event at world famous Laguna Seca Raceway. We clocked in a best lap time of 1:53, four seconds shy of Joe Nuxoll, former Tesla Motors employee and Tesla track-record holder, who registered an impressive 1:49 in a Tesla Roadster. Joe is an amazing driver with twenty five years of professional racing experience and we can certainly learn from the techniques, some EV specific, that he uses to maneuver through this difficult track. We will work hard on improving our skills and look forward to the challenge at next year’s event.
Laguna Seca Raceway
The Laguna Seca road course is located in beautiful Monterey County in Northern California and one of the most renown and recognizable tracks in the world. The track itself is challenging and similar to Sonoma Raceway in terms of track difficulty. Similar to Sonoma, Laguna Seca has walls and sand traps, both of which could lead to some bad consequences if you ventured off the track. The corkscrew is perhaps the most famous turn that the track is known for, with very sharp turns and drop in elevation, to a point where you can’t actually see the middle of the turn. You learn to navigate through feeling and use of an oak tree as your marker as you keep your wits through it all.
The Car
This is not the best track for the Tesla Model S. Power limitation due to overheating was rather severe, to a point where it would not even accelerate uphill at full throttle after turn 6. The track is very heavy on braking as well. We have never seen the brakes get so hot on any other track before and will likely consider racing brake fluid next time.
We reached a top speed of 113 mph on the front straightaway, but we feel that we can improve upon that with more experience. The last part of the straightaway before the hairpin turn is downhill and unwinding slightly, so losing control in that section is quite easy and can be disastrous at that speed (remember, walls). Max lateral G was 1.1 throughout various turns. We found that following correct racing lines produces much better lap times and much less stress on the car than on most other tracks, and turning in just a couple of feet sooner makes a difference between a great turn and a bad one.
The issue of steering wheel lock up at 1 lateral G happened again. Thanks to the Tesla Motors staff who were present at the track, we were able to find out that it’s indeed a known issue, although very few people would experience the effect unless driven hard on a race track. We were told that the fix would require steering recalibration which should just be a firmware update, but as imagined, it’s certainly not on Tesla’s priority list.
Tire pressure on our BFGoodrich g-Force Rival tires were 36 psi hot (approx. 29 psi cold). Although looking at the pictures below, it looks scary how compressed they get trough some of the turns.
First lap in the video is of the Time Trial. Subsequent laps are with Speed Ventures Green group and REFUEL.
Charging and Power Consumption
The track was heavy on power consumption, a little higher than usual, probably due to significant elevation changes. Power consumption was 1350 watts/mile. While on most tracks we used 4 rated miles per 1 actual mile driven, on this track it ended up being 5.5 rated miles per 1 actual mile driven. It also explains why power limitation was more severe.
Due to the Tesla user conference participation in the event (TMC Connect ), we had a royal treat with temporary Tesla Superchargers installed at the track. For the first time, we did not have to conserve power nor carefully plan for how many laps could be run. The supercharger was able to replenish the power from track use in about 20-30 minutes. It made us feel very spoiled. Thank you Tesla !
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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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