Lifestyle
Food delivery service turns to Tesla Model 3 in bid to replace Prius fleet and go emissions-free
Online food delivery service Bite Squad is looking to replace its fleet of Toyota Prius delivery cars with the Tesla Model 3 within the next few years. The food delivery startup plans to test the mass market compact sedan later this year, and if the Model 3 meets the company’s expectations, Bite Squad will be fully transitioning its fleet of hybrid delivery cars to the all-electric compact sedan.
Bite Squad’s Model 3 announcement was posted on the company’s blog earlier this month, with CEO Kian Salehi stating that Tesla’s newest vehicle can play a vital role in the company’s aim of having a fully emissions-free fleet. Currently, Bite Squad, which operates on 30 markets across the United States, utilizes a fleet of Toyota Priuses for its food deliveries. While the hybrids provide great fuel economy, however, the Bite Squad CEO stated that the all-electric Model 3 could provide an even cleaner, greener option.
“Our existing hybrid cars significantly cut emissions, but an all-electric fleet would be completely emissions-free. This is where we want to be.
“When we launched in 2012, the goal was to reduce the environmental impact of our fleet by using as many hybrid vehicles as we could. The goal is the same today, but the technology has changed. We now have an opportunity to further reduce our impact with an affordable battery-powered car.”
Bite Squad’s Toyota Prius fleet currently comprises roughly 10% of the company’s delivery vehicles. The rest of the cars deployed for the service are owned by Bite Squad’s drivers, who use their personal vehicles to deliver food to customers.
In a statement to the Star Tribune, Craig Key, Bite Squad’s VP for marketing, noted that the Model 3 could give the company great benefits and savings in the long run. While the mass market electric compact sedan is more expensive than a Toyota Prius, its all-electric drivetrain completely negates fuel expenses and reduces maintenance costs.
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Key further noted that the food delivery startup is looking forward to the rollout of the Model 3’s full self-driving capabilities. While the VP did state that a driverless food delivery service is not in the company’s plans for the near future, the autonomous features of the Model 3 would likely reduce the number of accidents that its vehicles will be involved in on the road.
“We think it could be a big game-changer for us both in terms of cost and liability and safety,” the Bite Squad VP said.
For now, however, Key stated that just like all other Model 3 reservation holders, the company is just waiting for Tesla to deliver its electric cars. Bite Squad placed reservations for the electric car last year, and while their vehicles’ delivery dates were initially set to late 2018, the subsequent delays in the production ramp-up of the Model 3 would likely push the delivery dates of the company’s new cars well into 2019.
As we noted in a previous article, Tesla has adjusted its expectations for the ramp-up of Model 3 deliveries during the California-based electric car firm’s Q4 2017 delivery report, with CEO Elon Musk moving the 5,000 a week production goal to the end of the second quarter. The 5,000-unit-per-week goal was initially set for the end of 2017.
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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