A startup called Lightship is modernizing RVs into the 21st Century, as the industry has long been stagnated by a lack of advancement in not only technology but design. The company’s founders, who both started their careers at Tesla, have brought a new mentality to the RV sector that is geared toward sustainability, efficiency, and modernization.
Ben Parker and Toby Kraus believed RVs needed to be revolutionized by pushing them in the direction of what the automotive industry is: forward and with a mentality of sustainability.
Parker said that during his days at Tesla, he was confused as to why the line of food trucks at the company’s then-headquarters in Palo Alto was positioned next to one another for the fumes of diesel and propane generators to leak into the area where food was prepared and served.
“Inefficient, unreliable product designs and power experience that relies on smelly, noisy gas or propane generators fundamentally hinder the amazing experience of traveling in the outdoors,” Parker said.
Lightship’s initial RV design is called the L1, and they label it the “first purpose-built all-electric RV.” Like most EVs, it has a significant focus on aerodynamics and efficiency, and the design was one of the most important metrics of this initial project.
The L1 is three times as aerodynamic as a traditional RV and helps contribute to greater efficiency and range. Trucks with 300-mile range ratings will have 300-mile range ratings whether they are pulling the L1 or not, and the same goes for gas trucks with MPG ratings of 25 MPG, for instance.
It also features an electric powertrain with up to 80 kWh of onboard battery capacity, which allows the trailer to propel itself and further contribute to the near-zero range and efficiency loss for the pulling vehicle, whether gas or electric.
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- Credit: Lightship
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- Credit: Lightship
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- Credit: Lightship
Furthermore, the living experience in the L1 is unlike any RV on the market. It has a battery energy storage system that is coupled with up to 3 kW of solar power, and can operate completely off-grid for an entire week.
All-electric appliances, connected features, and modern amenities fill out the interior of the L1, which Parker and Kraus said was fully designed with a modern twist while also offering some customization.
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- Credit: Lightship
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- Credit: Lightship
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- Credit: Lightship
The ultimate goal of Lightship is to bring towable RVs into flow with the vehicles of today. RVs are a sizeable industry within the United States, with 1 in 10 families owning one. It’s just the innovation that has been missing.
“With 90% of the market comprising of towable RVs, we began by creating an all-electric travel trailer that is unlike any RV available today and that is just the beginning,” Kraus said. “We are leveraging our expertise in automotive EV development and design to build a brand that creates delightful outdoor travel experiences for everyone and brings even more people into the pastime of RVing.”
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- Credit: Lightship
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- Credit: Lightship
The Lightship L1 is 27 feet long and 8-and-a-half feet wide and can weigh up to 7,500 pounds when fully loaded. It can comfortably sleep 4-6 people, depending on the configuration chosen, and features a variety of modes based on what the current application is, meaning Road Mode for travel time and Camp Mode when occupants finally arrive at their campground.
A starting price of $125,000 for the L1 can be brought down to $118,400 after available tax credits and can be reserved with a $500 deposit. Production is expected to begin in late 2024.
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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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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
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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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