Lifestyle
Climbing Mountains with the Tesla Model S
My recent roadtrip to Lake Placid, NY, a beautiful destination nestled within the Adirondack Mountains, gave me the opportunity to experience climbing mountains with the Tesla Model S.
Trip Planning
As with any Tesla road trip you need to make sure you’ve mapped out a charging plan for the trip, especially if the location takes you away from Tesla Superchargers. I was able to top off some charge at the Albany, NY Supercharger along the way but I knew this would be more of a challenge once I reached my destination. Tesla has been aggressively expanding their HPWC across hotels and popular destinations, but unfortunately Lake Placid, NY hasn’t been one of them. PlugShare indicated that there were two charging options in the area.
The first was at a Price Chopper grocery store which had a public (and free) J1772 charger. The store allowed people to use their chargers for up to 2 hours, but that wouldn’t be enough time to receive a meaningful charge. Plus, this location was also not close to the hotel we were staying at.
The second option I found was a rather unusual entry on PlugShare that showed a charging spot with standard outlets and a NEMA L6-30A outlet. Tesla doesn’t provide or sell a NEMA L6-30 adapter but I found one on Amazon and purchased it for the trip. Upon arriving at the charging location, I had to drive around a few times before finding a set of outlets attached to a tree in the back lot of the Crowne Plaza Lake Placid Hotel.
Charging through a NEMA L6-30 at Crowne Plaza Lake Placid Hotel
Having this reassurance that there’s a dedicated parking space with working charger, and at my hotel, I knew I could get plenty of charge to get me around town and sightsee.
I struck up conversation with a maintenance-man who’s worked at the hotel for over 20 years. After the usual “No they don’t actually catch on fire” conversation (when will that ever end??), I was told that the hotel placed these outlets here for the purpose of plugging in engine heating devices for gas cars. This is needed during the frigid winters, but according to him EV owners are also more than welcome to use it, as needed. He said, “if you’re paying for the rooms you’re more than paying for the electric too”. True.
Climbing Mountains
There’s a group of Tesla owners that get together on occasion and drive their Model S’ up Mount Washington. The timing has never worked out for me but it’s certainly something that I look to do down the road. Whiteface Mountain is one of the larger mountains in the Adirondacks and has a peak of 4,865 feet. There’s an access road that lets you drive up to 4,610 feet, but anything after that and you’re on your own.
I’ve never driven up large mountains before in the Model S so my range anxiety flared up for the first time in a long time. Could I drive up the mountain without running out of battery?
Just to be sure I was planned out, I double checked my routes against EVTripPlanner and it confirmed that I could make it up the mountain as long as I had buffered 15% of range for the hillclimb. I ended up using 14% of my energy to climb the mountain and regenerated 7% on the way back down.
Tesla Trip Planning feature
The drive up and down the mountain was absolutely gorgeous and it made driving the Model S more fun than it already is. I never touched my brakes the entire way down. Below is a video of my experience as captured through my BlackVue dashcam.
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Summary
Climbing mountains with the Tesla Model S couldn’t have been more fun. Finding charging locations, tackling the unknowns of traversing a large mountain and regen’ing all the way back down, all added to the amazing adventure.
We don’t often take destination trips such as this, but this positive experience had us wanting to go back for more. Until next time.
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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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