Lifestyle
Feeling Safe in the Tesla Model S
I won’t tell you that you can’t put a price on safety, or that surviving a serious car accident is worth all the money in the world. I won’t tell you that most people who can afford it are willing to pay a premium to be safe. I’ll leave that up to anyone who has ever been or known someone seriously injured or worse in a motor vehicle accident. They will tell you that safety is of the utmost importance.
I have only ever been in a moderate accident and can tell you that I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Just last week I discussed a rollover accident that a friend and his wife had just experienced in their SUV. They escaped with barely a bruise. When I asked if they felt any sort of indebtedness to their particular car, I was informed they had already purchased an exact replacement. You see, they had chosen it based on just two very specific criteria they considered to be non-negotiable: that it be a compact SUV and that it have a 5-star crash test rating from the NHTSA.
But what about those of us who have never been in a horrific accident or never will be? Perhaps for us, it’s the feeling of safety that’s worth it. Friday morning when I work up there was wet snow and slush on the ground. My husband looked over and said to me “Would you feel more comfortable taking Ellie?” Of course I would! The Tesla is great in snow, my other car is not. I’ve had a few bad winters in my Hyundai Genesis Coupe. It is a rear wheel drive sports coupe that can’t handle even a trace of snow, slush or ice without fishtails, slips and the overwhelming feeling that you have no control over the car. I’ve had many uncomfortable driving experiences with it: white-knuckles, stress and feeling that there’s no way I’m making it to my destination without an incident. It severely diminishes how good I feel on the road. In fact, it downright scares me. To me, just like how confidence in other arenas leads to success, feeling safe really means something. I’m happy that he let me take the car, as my commute is longer and his is a straight run on a major road. So there I was, driving along in my Telsa, feeling 100% comfortable; feeling 100% safe. I was feeling like the snow and slush that was on the road just wasn’t there. At no time during the whole commute did I slip or lose grip or take longer to stop than I would have on dry roads.
It’s hard to describe the comfort I felt that morning. I just knew that this car, along with safe and sensible driving would keep me from causing an accident. I also knew that if someone else who was not driving as sensibly happened to crash in to me, I would have had a very low chance of serious injury. That is what safety means. That is what Tesla has created. And that is what I had the privilege of experiencing that morning.
Safety in the Tesla goes far beyond good handling in snow and slush. The car was built from the ground up to exude safety in every measure. Recent software updates have even improved safety with additional features. Just this week I noticed that the color of the dash graphics on Autopilot enabled vehicles that show how close you are to another vehicle or object are more fluid than I originally thought. They don’t just go from white to yellow, then orange to red. In fact, those colors change slightly from white to pale yellow, become a more vivid yellow, then darken as they approach orange territory.
The right rear of the car shows the lightest yellow while right front shows a lighter yellow. On the left side of the car where a construction barrier was close by, the graphic darkened as I got closer.
While a sensor showing your proximity to objects may or may not have much an impact on the outcome of a serious crash, this is just one more feature that gives you the confidence to operate a Tesla and feel safe while you do it.
So again, we all value our safety. Now I think it’s time we also place as high a value on feeling safe.
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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.
Elon Musk
Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat
Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.
Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.
One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions
What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.
As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.
If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.
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Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Elon Musk explains what happens when AI outsmarts all of us
