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Elon Musk teases ‘Ice Blaster’ as The Boring Co. delivers first 1000 flamethrowers

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8 years ago

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Following the release of the Not-a-Flamethrower, it was only a matter of time before Elon Musk announced the next merchandise that The Boring Company would offer. Never one to disappoint, Musk stated that the Boring Co. Ice Blaster would be offered sometime before winter.

Elon Musk has actually mentioned the Boring Co. Ice Blaster earlier this year. Back in January, Musk was discussing the Not-a-Flamethrower on his Twitter page when one of his followers asked about the tunneling startup’s future products. During that time the Tesla and SpaceX CEO teased a device he dubbed as a “Freezegun.”

At this point, it seems safe to say that The Boring Company would indeed make an Ice Blaster sometime later this year. Musk, after all, has garnered a well-deserved reputation for joking about things on Twitter and eventually following up with something real. The Boring Co. Not-a-Flamethrower is the perfect example of this, as Musk first mentioned the device back in December 2017 seemingly as a joke, or at least that’s what it seemed like before the firestarter was released.

In a way, selling an Ice Blaster would not be too difficult for the tunneling startup. The materials needed for a handheld Ice Blaster, after all, are already very similar to the items that The Boring Co. utilized for the Not-a-Flamethrower, such as a tank of propane and an internal trigger mechanism. Considering that liquid propane becomes super cold when it gets dispensed, all the tunneling startup really needs to do is to repurpose the Not-a-Flamethrower by removing its igniter. Once that is complete, the Boring Co. Ice Blaster is as good as done.

This actually makes Elon Musk’s “before winter” timeline more than feasible. The company, after all, only needs to manufacture another batch of modified Not-a-Flamethrowers to release its next product. Pricing for the icy device has not been announced, but it’s possible that the TBC Ice Blaster would be priced at around the same range as its fiery counterpart.

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The Boring Company’s pickup party for the first 1,000 Not-a-Flamethrowers on Saturday appeared to be a success. Based on images posted by Musk of the event, it seems like Not-a-Flamethrower reservation holders were had a grand time. One buyer, Frank Ippolito, even noted that since he bought the Not-a-Flamethrower, he was going to donate $1,000 to the California Wildfire Relief Fund. Responding to the Not-a-Flamethrower buyer, Musk stated that the Boring Company would be donating $10,000 to the CWRF.

The Boring Company Not-a-Flamethrower was priced at $500 per piece, and it quickly proved to be an overwhelming success. The device sold out within four days, raising $10 million during its limited run. The Not-a-Flamethrower attracted its own set of critics, however, such as LA Assemblyman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles), who attempted to file a bill that would restrict the public’s access to flame-making devices. As we noted in a previous report, however, Santiago’s efforts ended up being held at the Assembly Appropriations Committee, ultimately becoming a victim of the state’s “suspense file” process.

For now, however, here’s an unboxing video of the Boring Company’s Not-a-Flamethrower, courtesy of Tesla owner-YouTuber and hypermiler that managed to squeeze 606 miles of range from a Model 3, Erik Strait.  

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Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

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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.

Published

6 hours ago

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August 7, 2026

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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.

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.

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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.

Published

1 week ago

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July 29, 2026

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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

Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific

Published

2 weeks ago

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July 23, 2026

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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.


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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