Lifestyle
Should Tesla have ended its Referral Program?
Tesla’s long-running and generous referral program came to an end on February 2, with CEO Elon Musk citing too much cost to the company’s vehicles, especially the Model 3. The system that rewarded so many with so much was finally concluded, but should it have been?
Teslanomics host and Tesla owner-enthusiast Ben Sullins noted in a recent video that the electric carmaker maybe – just maybe – made the wrong decision when it retired its referral program. Tesla’s referral program actually compares favorably to initiatives of other carmakers like General Motors when it comes to return of investment, notes Ben in his analysis. Case in point: GM spent around $3.24 billion in advertising in 2017 versus its auto revenue of $146 billion during the year. This translates to a 45x ROI, meaning that for every dollar the automaker spent on advertising, GM got $45 in revenue.
Tesla, on the other hand, has not released the actual costs of the referral program, but considering the price of the approximately 160 free next-gen Roadsters that Tesla will give out, the Teslanomics host estimates the program to have cost Tesla around $32 million, at least considering the costs associated with the program’s most prolific prize. Compared with the $17.63 billion in auto revenue that Tesla reported for 2018 in its recent Update Letter, the company’s $32 million cost for the free Roadsters actually gives a healthy 550x ROI. This means that for every dollar Tesla spent on the referral program’s largest prize, the company received $550 back in return.
Ben also noted that among automakers in the United States, Tesla is among the ones with the least advertising spending per vehicle sold, at just around $106. This is lower than Porsche’s $161 advertising spending per car, and far below Volkswagen’s $1,211 spending per vehicle sold.
Ultimately, the Tesla owner-enthusiast concluded that it would probably be best for the electric car maker to bring back its referral program, though in a more balanced form. This would actually be a pretty good idea, considering that the story of Tesla’s referral system is a classic tale of a good idea that eventually became unsustainable in the face of growth. A great way to illustrate this would probably be a poll that Teslarati ran after Elon Musk’s announcement last month. Based on the results of our poll, the majority of voters were actually on board with the referral program’s retirement.
Tesla’s Referral Program is coming to an end …
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) January 19, 2019
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It should be noted that Ben and other social media influencers have helped spearhead tremendous word-of-mouth sales for Tesla, while also leveraging their following as a way to gain the necessary referrals to win the upcoming supercar. Some twice. Apart from this, the Teslanomics host’s computations for the rewards system only includes the price of the Roadster and doesn’t take into account other factors connected to the program, such as logistics, developments costs, and other time value costs involved in the production and fulfillment of prizes.
It would be easy to point fingers at who or what is really responsible for the end of Tesla’s generous referral program. It could be influencers who utilized their platforms of choice to refer dozens or even hundreds of new customers. It could also be the Model 3 owners, whose lower-margin vehicles practically flooded the system, rendering it unsustainable. Overall, the fall of the referral program is simply due to Tesla’s inability to balance its rewards system. Perhaps capping the prizes at a point (stopping at one Roadster would have been a great idea, or giving lower-tier prizes for lower-margin vehicles) would have solved the issue. Nevertheless, it would be up to Tesla now if it decides to roll out a similar, more balanced program in the near future.
Watch Ben Sullins’ take on the retirement of Tesla’s referral program in the video below.
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
