Four years ago, a member of the United States Air Force put his puppy in the front trunk of his Tesla Model 3 and took a photo. It was a decision that ended up starting a movement that even Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his mother, Maye Musk, participated in: Frunk Puppy Friday.
The frunk trunk (frunk) of a Tesla and other EVs is where the engine would be in a typical internal combustion engine vehicle. Since Tesla doesn’t have an engine, the design team of the vehicles created a nifty storage space that is great for taking photos of pets. Other EV makers have followed suit.
The Frunk Puppy Friday movement is coming up on its four-year anniversary on August 18. Frunk Puppy Friday is a contest where EV owners put their pets in the frunks of their vehicles and take photos. Using the hashtag, #frunkpuppyfriday, they submit the photos to a Twitter contest. Every week, four photos are picked by the Frunk Puppy Board, and Twitter votes for the best one.
Interview with Dr. Earl Banning, the creator of Frunk Puppy Friday
It’s been four years of Frunk Puppy Friday and I asked Earl how felt about this upcoming anniversary.
“It’s pretty mind-blowing. As you know, I started to think about this idea after my wife’s brain hemorrhage and was in the hospital and it was just a real emotional time. People throughout the Tesla community were really helpful and being there over text messages, Twitter messages.”
Earl wanted to do something for the Tesla community back in 2018. Back then, Tesla was struggling, the short selling and the ensuing misinformation about Tesla were intense and Earl just wanted to do something positive to bring balance.
Fighting FUD and facing the possibility of losing his wife to a brain aneurysm
Earl was inspired to fight for Tesla and to take part in combatting all of the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) that was just continuous. And then the unthinkable happened. Earl’s wife had a brain aneurysm and almost died.
-
“There were a lot of short-sellers and there were a lot of people attacking everybody and Tesla wasn’t in great shape at times. It was a little rough.”
“I just didn’t feel like happy to argue. I needed something else. So what’s better than dogs and Teslas? I thought about how the frunk is special. So I was brainstorming and trying to figure out what I could do.”
“I like dogs so I put a dog in a frunk and came up with the word Frunk Puppy and it seemed to stick. And it wasn’t really until we were leaving the hospital after the second surgery that I put Norman in the frunk and took a picture.”
The moment when Frunk Puppy began to take off
Earl shared his photo with his friends on Twitter and encouraged them to join him in taking photos of their puppies in frunks.
“It was really Trevor Page from Model 3 Owners who put his cat in the frunk and tweeted it,” Earl told me. Back then Earl’s account wasn’t as large as it is now but Trevor’s was. Once Trevor took a frunk kitty photo, the movement took off and people began taking photos of their pets in their frunks.
“It blew up around the world. There were entries from China and all over Europe, the U.S., Canada, and then of course, Maye Musk by October. I developed it in August and by October–Halloween–she put her dog in the frunk and that’s when things went totally bananas.”
The Frunk Puppy movement began to take off so Earl began a contest. Many members of the Tesla community are also small business owners and were sponsoring prizes for the winners of the weekly poll.
“We had all these entries so I formed this little board of people to start voting on them. I wanted it to be a true democracy. I didn’t want to just pick it which I used to do. I wanted people to narrow it down to the top four and vote on Twitter.”
-
Frunk Puppy Is now 4 years old.
Earl expected the movement to eventually fade away as things do, but that isn’t happening anytime soon. The Frunk Puppy movement has become sort of a rite of passage for most EV owners who take photos of their pets in their frunks.
Earl told me that the board gets 40-50 entries per month and that people really appreciate it.
“If I’m late at putting the vote up on Friday, I start getting all these messages from people. ‘Where’s the poll? It’s all I look forward to,’ type of messages. So there are definitely people who appreciate it. Hundreds of people vote every week. And it’s very light-hearted.”
“I always imagined it to be very agnostic. I didn’t want it to be a Tesla-only thing. I wanted it to raise awareness for EVs. My hope at the time was that all EVs would have frunk. It’s a great way to start a conversation about EVs and it’s an infectious hashtag to really point out EVs, clean energy, and no emissions. And look, you can put your dog in where the engine should be and take a picture. I think that’s so cool.”
“Early on, we had winners who had Nissan LEAFs and that grew over time where Lucid wrote ‘#FrunkPuppy’ and posted a photo with a dog in their frunk on Instagram. This was pretty cool because the cars hadn’t even come out yet.”
A frunk fit for all our furry friends. #NationalPuppyDay #FrunkPuppy pic.twitter.com/W3ttmyo8Jd
— Lucid Motors (@LucidMotors) March 23, 2021
-
“Bollinger was a repeat winner many times in a row with their awesome frunk and Rivian has slipped right in. We had someone in the top 4 last week. We’ve had several Rivians now. But the Ford Lightning has really taken over. Two weeks ago, we had two of the top four with Ford Lightning. It’s just an enormous frunk. It’s perfect. People have dogs and trucks.”
How Earl felt when Elon Musk posted his Frunk Puppy Friday submission.
https://twitter.com/28delayslater/status/1446128079802286088?
Although Elon Musk didn’t use the hashtag #frunkpuppyfriday, with one tweet, Elon united the EV community, the Dogecoin community, and puppy lovers with one of the most adorable photos of a puppy in a frunk. I asked how Earl felt when Elon used something he created.
“I have a mug and it has three parts on it. The first part is Elon saying his dog’s name is Floki. The second one is of me saying ‘for the love of God put that dog in the frunk.’ The third part was him agreeing.”`
Floki Frunkpuppy pic.twitter.com/xAr8T0Jfdf
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 4, 2021
-
‘And then he did it. He wrote the word Frunk Puppy which is really funny because he’s like the richest guy in the world taking time to put his dog in a frunk and post it. And of course, Floki won that year. He won that week and the year.”
“It was so incredible that Elon had taken the time to do that. It was such a silly ask and then he sees my tweet and agrees. And then he actually does it on time. He did it when he said he would do it. I was really overwhelmed.”
Earl told me that EV owners across brands are submitting photos of their pets in frunks which is what he always wanted it to be.
The Future of Frunk Puppy
The way time has been flying, Frunk Puppy will be at its fifth anniversary. With that in mind, I asked Earl what he had in store for the future.
“I would like to have more participation across brands which I think will happen as more people buy EVs. I’m not a tech person and haven’t put the time into it, but one of my dreams is to take the voting off of Twitter and put it on my Frunk Puppy website because I feel like it’s a real disservice.
“You click the tweet and it’s such a tiny picture with poor resolution. What I would hope is that maybe even all of the pictures from the week are there and you just vote on the one you want. Or still do a top four but when you go onto the website you can see giant pictures. Some pictures are beautiful pictures but when you look at it on Twitter it’s lackluster.”
Earl also said he wouldn’t mind getting back to having prizes. When Covid-19 hit, a lot of small businesses suffered and closed down. He also said he would like to do more charity fundraisers. One issue he had with the prizes is that people wouldn’t want them. People were more interested in winning the Frunk Puppy Friday vote simply just to win.
-
The community of Frunk Puppy
Earl loves seeing all the pictures every week and he’s proud of the movement.
“It’s just so cool to me that people do that and they’re so creative. I see people continue to really have fun with it. Sometimes, as I said, Twitter can be a bit of a downer but you see such a playful creative side to people where they’re decorating the inside frunk or dressing up their dog. They’re really having fun with it and to me, that means a lot.”
Earl told me that some pet owners would tell him when their dog or pet died and he’d do a one last Frunk Puppy picture in their honor.
“I tear up a little bit. It’s pretty cool that they send these to me. Over four years, there’s a lot of dogs that have won who aren’t with us anymore and I’ll do a memorial tweet or video.”
Helping Pets In Need.
One thing that Earl has done with the Frunk Puppy movement was help pets in need. In fact, this community helped save both of my cats when I found myself suddenly a new kitty mom. Tesla, (yes his name is Tesla as I am a fan) was found when he was eight days old and I had to bottle feed him.
Peanut was brought to me by a neighbor who found her with glue poured all over her. Someone had not only put Peanut in a glue trap, but they tried to drown her in glue. We used an entire jar of peanut butter to get the glue out of her fur and it saved her life.
Earl told me that recently there was a cat found in a trash can with one eye. He needed surgery and that cat is fine now. It had the surgery, got adopted, and has a sibling with no eyes.
-
“Over the years I’ve used Frunk Puppy for charity. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do. I wish I could find ways to do that a little more formally because people are very generous and it’s a good awareness tool. Sometimes people will put a foster dog in their frunk and it gets a lot of tweets.”
“Another thing that I’m working on with Mother Frunker is that we’re going to take all the winners from the year and make a coffee table book. And then donate all the proceeds to charity. That’ll be the end of this year.”
The Frunk Puppy Friday movement has evolved over the past four years and is going strong. It’s inclusive for all EVs and all types of pets. Little Tesla was a winner when I submitted him in 2019.
Although I don’t own a car, Tesla friends often drive through Baton Rouge and this was the perfect opportunity for a Frunk Puppy Friday submission and a way to let the Tesla community know that the kitty they helped to save was doing fine.
Meet Little Tesla, a kitty who was abandoned by his mom at 8 days old. We didn't think her wpild make it. Frunk provided by @ChrisjonesLee #FrunkPuppyFriday #FrunkKittyFriday pic.twitter.com/n1OZYWKVI4
— Johnna (@JohnnaCrider1) November 15, 2019
-
Disclaimer: Johnna is long Tesla.
I’d love to hear from you! If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
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.
-
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
-
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.
Elon Musk
Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat
Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.
Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.
One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions
What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.
As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.
If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.
-
Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
Tesla briefly offered this Robotaxi part for your personal car
