Lifestyle
Feeling Safe in the Tesla Model S
I won’t tell you that you can’t put a price on safety, or that surviving a serious car accident is worth all the money in the world. I won’t tell you that most people who can afford it are willing to pay a premium to be safe. I’ll leave that up to anyone who has ever been or known someone seriously injured or worse in a motor vehicle accident. They will tell you that safety is of the utmost importance.
I have only ever been in a moderate accident and can tell you that I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Just last week I discussed a rollover accident that a friend and his wife had just experienced in their SUV. They escaped with barely a bruise. When I asked if they felt any sort of indebtedness to their particular car, I was informed they had already purchased an exact replacement. You see, they had chosen it based on just two very specific criteria they considered to be non-negotiable: that it be a compact SUV and that it have a 5-star crash test rating from the NHTSA.
But what about those of us who have never been in a horrific accident or never will be? Perhaps for us, it’s the feeling of safety that’s worth it. Friday morning when I work up there was wet snow and slush on the ground. My husband looked over and said to me “Would you feel more comfortable taking Ellie?” Of course I would! The Tesla is great in snow, my other car is not. I’ve had a few bad winters in my Hyundai Genesis Coupe. It is a rear wheel drive sports coupe that can’t handle even a trace of snow, slush or ice without fishtails, slips and the overwhelming feeling that you have no control over the car. I’ve had many uncomfortable driving experiences with it: white-knuckles, stress and feeling that there’s no way I’m making it to my destination without an incident. It severely diminishes how good I feel on the road. In fact, it downright scares me. To me, just like how confidence in other arenas leads to success, feeling safe really means something. I’m happy that he let me take the car, as my commute is longer and his is a straight run on a major road. So there I was, driving along in my Telsa, feeling 100% comfortable; feeling 100% safe. I was feeling like the snow and slush that was on the road just wasn’t there. At no time during the whole commute did I slip or lose grip or take longer to stop than I would have on dry roads.
It’s hard to describe the comfort I felt that morning. I just knew that this car, along with safe and sensible driving would keep me from causing an accident. I also knew that if someone else who was not driving as sensibly happened to crash in to me, I would have had a very low chance of serious injury. That is what safety means. That is what Tesla has created. And that is what I had the privilege of experiencing that morning.
Safety in the Tesla goes far beyond good handling in snow and slush. The car was built from the ground up to exude safety in every measure. Recent software updates have even improved safety with additional features. Just this week I noticed that the color of the dash graphics on Autopilot enabled vehicles that show how close you are to another vehicle or object are more fluid than I originally thought. They don’t just go from white to yellow, then orange to red. In fact, those colors change slightly from white to pale yellow, become a more vivid yellow, then darken as they approach orange territory.
The right rear of the car shows the lightest yellow while right front shows a lighter yellow. On the left side of the car where a construction barrier was close by, the graphic darkened as I got closer.
While a sensor showing your proximity to objects may or may not have much an impact on the outcome of a serious crash, this is just one more feature that gives you the confidence to operate a Tesla and feel safe while you do it.
So again, we all value our safety. Now I think it’s time we also place as high a value on feeling safe.
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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.
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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Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
