Lifestyle
Tesla shows proactive approach to passengers’ safety after Model 3 accident
Vancouver resident Peter Levey and his wife waited more than two years for their Long Range RWD Tesla Model 3. As part of their celebration for the new electric car, the couple embarked on what was supposed to be a multi-day road trip heading south to San Diego and back. Levey notes that the trip was two years in the making, and he and his wife were looking forward to it.
The first days of the road trip were everything that Peter and his spouse expected, plus more. On the first day of the trip, the couple headed to Portland, clocking in 322.3 miles on the road but only using 68 kWh of their vehicle’s 75 kWh battery, even with the A/C on during the entire trip. Unfortunately for Peter, the trip was unceremoniously cut short when a 4-door Dodge slammed into the back of their Model 3 at the intersection of Coastal Hwy 101 and Matlock Way in Oregon. The impact was notable, causing the Model 3 to get shoved 15-20 ft forward.
Authorities later informed Peter that the Dodge was likely traveling more than 40 mph when it collided with the electric sedan. The gas-powered car was significantly damaged, completely smashing its front end. Its hood was also bent at an inverted V, and its radiator was hanging out. The Model 3 showed far less damage. Multiple panels were dented, but apart from a couple of broken lights at the rear, the structural integrity of the vehicle was not compromised in any way. Peter noted in a video of the incident he uploaded on his model3man YouTube channel that even the contents of the Model 3’s trunk were unharmed by the collision.
Similar to other stories of Teslas involved in accidents, Peter’s Model 3 protected him and his wife well. They both escaped injury, and they were able to walk away from the crash without any problems. Inasmuch as this is impressive, Peter notes that what really struck him was how Tesla proactively reached out to him after the accident. For Peter, it was this approach to safety that truly made him believe how serious the company is about improving its cars and keeping its passengers secure.
“I have to say two things, and they are both about Tesla, the company, and their response to us. About a minute and a half to two minutes after the time of impact, my cellphone rang, and I looked at it, and I didn’t recognize the number — it was a 1-877. It turned out to be Tesla Roadside Assistance, and their first question was ‘Our computers show that you suffered a major impact. Are you guys okay? Were you in an accident?’ and I cannot tell you how comforting that was.
“It was just amazing. There we were — we felt alone, we felt isolated, we didn’t feel like talking to the guy behind us for obvious reasons, and there comes a call, and it’s from your car company. So we were incredibly impressed by that. And later in the afternoon, and later in the evening, Tesla Roadside Assistance worked diligently with us to try and get the car into Towing Mode, to give us everything we could try. It was most impressive.”
Tesla Roadside Assistance’s proactive response to the accident is just half of the story. A day after, Peter received yet another call from Tesla. This time, the call was from Tesla’s head of safety engineering, who asked if he and his wife were doing alright, and if he had any suggestions on how to improve the Model 3’s safety systems even more.
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“The next day, when I got home from Vancouver, I got another call from the head of safety engineering, and he wanted to find out how we were. He also wanted to find out ‘What can we do to make this car safer? What can we do to give an even greater measure of safety to the occupants?’ and that was mind-blowing. I’ve never had that from any car company, and I understand why people now say the Tesla Model S, Model X, and Model 3 are the safest cars on the road.”
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- Damages incurred by a Model 3 after a rear-end collision. [Credit: Peter Levey/YouTube]
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- Damages incurred by a Model 3 after a rear-end collision. [Credit: Peter Levey/YouTube]
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- Damages incurred by a Model 3 after a rear-end collision. [Credit: Peter Levey/YouTube]
Damages incurred by Peter Levey’s Tesla Model 3 after a rear-end collision. [Credit: model3man/YouTube]
Peter’s Model 3, whom he christened as “Red Dragon,” is currently in a Tesla-approved body shop to see if the vehicle could still be repaired. In a phone conversation with Teslarati, Peter stated that he hopes the wait for his vehicle’s repair (if it is indeed repairable) would not be too long. But even if it does take some time, he lightheartedly noted that he has a considerable amount of experience when it comes to waiting for his Model 3. Ultimately, Peter stated that he is sharing his experience not only to highlight the safety of Tesla’s vehicles. It is also about iterating how Tesla’s proactive response to its customers makes them a unique company that is both innovative and still incredibly emphatic.
“That kind of response inspires confidence among customers. They don’t abandon them when accidents happen,” he said.
Just like the Model S and Model X, the Model 3’s all-electric design does not feature a front-mounted gas-powered engine and a rear-mounted gas tank, which are found on conventional gasoline vehicles. The absence of the engine and gas tank acts as an extra large crumple zone that is capable of absorbing energy during high-speed collisions for. Apart from the ultra-high-strength steel and aluminum used for Model 3’s body structure, its floor-mounted battery pack provides further structural rigidity to the electric car. Earlier this year, the Model 3 was given a “Superior” front crash avoidance rating by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, which also praised the vehicle for its Forward Collision Warning and auto brake system.
Watch Peter’s YouTube video of his Model 3’s accident below.
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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
