Lifestyle
Why Tesla owners embrace having a high mileage car
Low miles! Like new! Runs great! These phrases on neon stickers adorn windshields in used car lots everywhere. When shopping for any car other than brand new, mileage is about the first thing buyers want to know. The reasons why are obvious: cars and their many components break down over time and mileage is the best indicator of which parts may fail or may have already. Warranties are largely based on mileage as well, so there are plenty of incentives to buy a car with low mileage and to keep your cars as low possible. At least, those cars you intend to trade-in or sell at some point. Bonus points to those awesome, adventurous ICE drivers who keep their cars well past when the odometer hits six digits!
One of the many amazing things about electric vehicles is their lack of complicated mechanical systems. Tesla takes this to the extreme, with a relatively simple copper coil motor design. Unlike the EV version of a Volkswagen Golf for example, when you open the hood of a Tesla, you see open space. In fact, Tesla is so confident in the simple and low-maintenance mechanical systems of their cars, all new ones come with an 8 year/unlimited mile battery and drive unit warranty.
Combine these facts with the wide availability of a reliable fast charging network and a car that is an absolute joy to drive and you end up with a whole lot of miles on your Tesla. The paradigm is so different that when I came up on a Model S at a stop light yesterday, I couldn’t help but blurt out “I have over 30,000 miles on my Model S!” Of course I was driving a different car yesterday, but I digress. Almost as proud a badge of honor I wear my inclusion in the Tesla owners’ club, I wear my relatively high mileage proudly. It won’t be long before the odometer surpasses that of the ICE I brought home in December of 2012, two full year earlier than our Tesla. All of the issues we have had with our Model S have been completely unrelated to driving. We’ve had two door handle problems and a panoramic roof drip, neither of which made the car unsafe, unreliable or unable to be driven. The car drives every bit today like it did the day we brought it home. Actually, that’s a lie. It drives better thanks to over-the-air software updates.
My point is that for all the ways a Tesla drives just like any other car, it’s also the complete opposite. You don’t care about how much gas you’re burning through, how quickly your next oil change will be due, or how the more you drive, the most costly repairs will be required sooner.
I can’t wait to embark on an 1,800 mile road trip next weekend. It’ll be the longest trip on wheels my husband or I have ever driven. I can’t wait to see the ultimate effects this trip has on the odometer, or the official number it will read as of our 2nd anniversary of ownership on December 4th. It’s a bit of a crazy notion but high mileage on a Tesla is awesome.
Actually, I can’t wait for the trip in general. I always knew I’d get to see Chicago some day. After all, it’s the last major city I haven’t. I just always assumed I’d fly there. I don’t even rent cars when I travel, I just hop on a plane from my hometown to some other city, stay in the center of it all, and get around on foot. I used to fly right over most states without giving a second thought to what those states look like but Tesla ownership changes more than just your opinion on racking up a lot of miles. It changes long distance road travel by making it easy and convenient. It means my trip to Chicago and back will actually take me into five distinct additional cities; 4 of which I’ve also never been to.
Don’t blink. You don’t want to miss Tesla turning the car ownership experience on its head… again.
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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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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
