Lifestyle
‘EVTripping’ launches app to enhance the Tesla road trip planning experience
Planning a road trip with the Model S and Model X is as easy as plugging in a destination address through the vehicle’s onboard Nav, getting in the car, and then going. At least that’s what Tesla’s Trip Planner aims to do, but the truth of the matter is, it falls short on some areas that I find critical when planning for a long distance all electric road trip.
Having gone through a busy summer of traveling, with one Tesla road trip taking me as far as Boston to South Florida, and another trip to Alaska – though this one I flew to, I’ve had time to think about additional features that I myself would like to have access to when planning for an EV trip. I figured that if these are features I felt a need for, there certainly has to be other folks within the Tesla community sharing the same sentiment.
So I decided to build it. EVTripping.com
North to Alaska! Picture of Denali, the highest mountain peak in North America
Existing EV Planning Tools
Let’s start by highlighting some of the popular services out there: PlugShare, Teslarati’s Interactice Supercharger Map, OpenChargeMap, and the popular EVTripPlanner. Each service has its own specific purpose, and they all provide a wealth of information for trip planning. But still I wished I can somehow combine features from each service into one app, but also add to it with additional features.
I’ve compiled a wish list of features that I hope to address with EVTripping.
- At present time no app or service that I know of, outside of the existing Tesla navigation system, is able to predict charge times needed for charging stops. Tesla does it but they tend to be overly optimistic about how much charge time is needed. (EVTripPlanner has since added more realistic charge times which is very helpful)
- We need to be able to see true elapsed time for the trip in order to better predict where one will be at any given time
- It would be nice to be able to see points of interest along the journey such as destinations for food.
- Being able to export the trip planning details in digital form or print it out as a PDF would be a nice to have.
- Weather is a variable that can change along your journey. This should be reflected when planning for a Tesla road trip.
Creation of EVTripping
I’m proud to announce that less than 6 months after I conceived the idea for a new online trip planner, EVTripping.com was born.
If you want to learn more about the sequence of events that led to the launch of EVTripping.com, follow along and check out the timeline which describes everything that’s being worked on.
Response to the site has been overwhelmingly positive despite very limited coverage so far. We’ve added over 200 1000 registered users in less than a week and routed almost a quarter million miles on the production site.
I’ll speak of the site in terms of “we” and “our” because, while I’m the chief cook and bottle washer for the site, I see this as a project for and by the community. Many of you are already helping by filing bug reports, suggesting feature requests and sharing ideas.
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We’ve been busy this first week of launch. We’ve fixed bugs, added international support, adjusted time based on a user’s geography, built multi-language support, added foreign character support, and continue to refine the routing intelligence. Early users of the app have been super helpful and supportive so I’d like to thank each and every one of them.
Free Tesla Monitoring
I’ve written an open-source tool before that allows me to take control of my Tesla while also monitoring my SolarCity production. EVTripping adds much of the same functionality when it comes to notifications. The app will monitor your Tesla and remind you when it’s time to rotate your tires, how much you’re driving, the efficiency you’re getting, and more.
I’m focussed on building the tools I need for my Tesla lifestyle and will share them with the community along the way.
The Future
We’re not done yet with EVTripping. I call this stage the “minimum viable product”. Where we go from here will depend on you and others within the EV community. Though I have plenty of product level ideas, we can decide on these together.
One of my big dreams for the site is to add support for other EVs beyond Tesla. I’m defining an EV as an electric vehicle capable of taking a road trip using Superchargers, CHAdeMO, CCS, etc, versus one that you can take trips in, but have to plug in for many hours each time you stop.
There’s no shortage of media outlets covering Tesla, and fantastic podcasts like Ride the Lightning and Talking Tesla, but my focus since I began writing was to talk about the lifestyle component of owning, and living, with a Tesla. It’s been a fun journey thus far and I’m excited about what the future holds as I continue to build out EVTripping for you and the greater EV community.
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
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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