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How does Tesla’s web presence compare to its competitors?

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The internet is one of the first places car buyers go when researching electric vehicles. Tesla dominates the market, but they aren’t without competition. Those competitors are going to do everything possible not only to keep up with Tesla’s products, but also try to grab as much web real estate, search traffic, and clicks as possible.

So how does Tesla stack up against its competitors when it comes to web presence? Let’s find out:

Tesla on the Internet

First let’s look at Tesla’s online world, and then we’ll check out the rest. Right away Tesla has a huge advantage thanks in large part to charismatic CEO Elon Musk. Even people who aren’t interested in cars consider him a household name. Nearly anything he says or does captures headlines and gets people talking. Tesla gets entire articles written about them on the largest publishers in the world from Musk’s individual tweets, which helps them dominate the blogosphere when it comes to news. Can you name a CEO of any other company that has such a strong presence? If you’re a regular consumer, probably not.

That high level of familiarity extends to social media, too, in large part because Musk writes his own tweets and has over five million followers. On Facebook, fans can click a link to design their dream Tesla or look through a variety of relevant content, ranging from news stories to videos. The brand’s Instagram channel, which has over a million followers, features hundreds of inspiring photos.

Model-S-P100D-badge-road

Interestingly, Tesla’s website itself doesn’t have a social media section, which is it’s one downfall. It’s very clean and modern, and uses colors similar to apple.com.

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Having a rockstar-type CEO means Tesla’s competitors have their online work cut out for them. Let’s look at how their competitors market their electronic models on the Web.

General Motors

Maker of the Chevy Bolt, General Motors largely relies on external media outlets to spread the word about its car. Cruise Automation, an autonomous car technology company acquired by General Motors, released a snapshot of the self-driving car cruising around San Francisco.

Soon afterward, Mashable picked up the story, along with other news outlets. Details were scarce, but the picture sparked curiosity. It certainly didn’t create the buzz of Tesla.

Chevy has tried extremely and possibly too hard at using the internet to reach millennials. It spent an entire campaign based around emoji’s, which seemed forced and out of touch. Can you sit through this entire commercial without being embarrassed for them?

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With the Bolt though, things may finally be heading in the right direction for them. Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak just announced yesterday that he’s ditching his Tesla for the Bolt. In the online world, that’s a big deal, and is already starting to grab headlines. A Google search for his name right now shows up more articles about his choice of car than about the hugely newsworthy iPhone 7 announcement.

Nissan

2016_nissan_leaf_electric_carNissan made a smart move by creating social media accounts specifically for the Leaf, its electric vehicle, so interested purchasers could get targeted information. There are designated Nissan Leaf channels on Facebook and Twitter, each with new content posted least daily. Topics vary, from tips for finding fellow electric car enthusiasts in your area to funny pictures viewers can caption.

Their actual website isn’t nearly as nice, and uses a few large images that don’t make much sense. For example, one of the first things you see is a huge image of the rear windshield.

BMW

The i3 is BMW’s contribution to the electric car market. During the 2015 Super Bowl, the company put a commercial online that offered a dose of nostalgia. Featuring Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel, the spot played off of the pair’s famous “What is the internet?” segment, which aired on the “Today” show in 1994.

The modern commercial suggested that similarly to the internet, the BMW i3 would change society’s perception of what’s possible. Twitter followers responded especially well, praising the ad for the way it was different from the typical male-centric Super Bowl commercial and made them think of days past.

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Unlike Nissan, BMW hasn’t created specific social media profiles for the i3. However, it has one of the earliest forms of social media — a message board. The Circuit is a forum for i3 owners and enthusiasts. Although the approach makes sense, the message board isn’t often used and has just over a couple hundred posts in its most popular section.

Ford and Google

True to form, Elon Musk wowed consumers by discussing ongoing work related to Tesla’s fully autonomous car. Musk asserts the technology will be ready well before regulators approve it for public use. Even in these early stages, he confidently talks about how impressed he is about the technology so far.

Musk’s words came as no surprise to Google and Ford, as those companies plan to compete with Tesla. At the end of last year, the two companies said they’d come together to engineer self-driving cars.

Ford has one of the most impressive websites, but because they have so much to offer, the spotlight doesn’t reach anything electric very often. They’re one to keep an eye on for the future.

Mercedes

Last month, Mercedes attracted attention on the internet by publicizing plans to directly challenge Tesla and other electric car brands by creating a to-be-named sub brand of electric vehicles that’ll include a minimum of two SUVs and two sedans. Earlier, the brand promoted its AA class of electric vehicles with a memorable “Saturday Night Live” spoof featuring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It originated on TV but got significant online traction through social sharing.

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The brand will reportedly showcase the first of its new electric vehicles at a Parisian auto show soon. Only time will tell whether Mercedes can truly pose a threat to Tesla, but the brand’s already created a buzz through online news articles about its upcoming offerings posted on well-known sites such as TechCrunch and Bloomberg.

Audi

You might say Audi is the least-likely Tesla challenger since it doesn’t have a fully electric vehicle yet. Even so, automotive media outlets report the company may be testing an electric version of its A7. Pictures of a prototype show a car without exhaust tips, which could indicate an emissions-free design.

Beyond the potential electric version of the A7, Audi will release an electric SUV in 2018. The A7 snapshots have drawn attention online because some media outlets specifically focused on how the pictures might show sneak peeks of electric car technology. They also point out how Audi’s hybrid cars have charging ports behind the front grilles and speculate how it’d be easy to install them on the A7, too.

Audi has generalized social media profiles and those related to the brand’s racing vehicles. It might capitalize upon current electric vehicle interest and branch out further by creating profiles for those cars, too.

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While their competitors are on the right track, Tesla remains a formidable online marketing force. It probably helps that Tesla has stayed on track for making electric, driverless cars while the other brands mentioned have numerous other goals. They’ve all taken good first steps but have a long way to go before reaching Tesla’s level.

Owner of Off The Throttle. Writes about cars for Forbes, Yahoo Autos, Business Insider, more. Slightly colorblind.

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Elon Musk

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

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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.”

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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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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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tesla diner

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.

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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.

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