Lifestyle
Modified Saleen Ford F-150 Lightning appears at historic off-road race
A Ford F-150 Lightning, modified by the performance shop Saleen, has made an appearance at the King of the Hammers off-road event.
The King of the Hammers off-road event has quickly gained prominence in the world of off-roading and is a prominent location for manufacturers and performance shops to show off their newest projects. While this has mostly been dominated by gas and diesel trucks, that is beginning to change as electric trucks, like the Ford F-150 Lightning, have entered the mix.
Saleen wasn’t exactly keen on sharing the details on their newest electric truck with Teslarati, but the modifications seen on the F-150 Lightning test vehicle seem incredibly extensive, leading many to call it a new Raptor competitor.
Lighting Raptor??? pic.twitter.com/hTF5Ck4dST
— omg_Tesla/Rivian (@omg_tesla) February 18, 2023
Immediately apparent is how the truck has been dramatically lifted to increase ground clearance and articulation in the challenging rocky terrain of California. Further, the electric truck has a new set of off-road tires and requisite fender flares. Many have also hypothesized that the performance brand has included more underbody protection to ensure rocks and debris don’t damage the battery. Still, at this point, those estimates are pure conjecture.
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It remains unclear if any performance upgrades to the motors or battery have been done to make the Lightning quicker off the line. Still, thanks to its already adequate 580 horsepower and 775 pound-feet of torque from its dual-motor system, it may not need any.
Ford wasn’t the only brand represented at the King of the Hammers event. A strong contingent of Rivian R1Ts and R1Ss shows that owners are staying true to the “adventure” ethos of their electric truck brand. And while the Rivians at the event were potentially less modified than the Saleen seen at the event, they were no less impressive.
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- Credit: OPTIMA Batteries
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- Credit: OPTIMA Batteries
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- Credit: OPTIMA Batteries
According to event sponsor OPTIMA Batteries, “More than 40 EV owners cast aside their range anxiety and made the trek out to Hammertown, where OPTIMA had several chargers waiting for their arrival. OPTIMA Brand Ambassador, Tanner Foust, helped pace the group in a very capable Volkswagen ID.4 and a poker run took place at three runs.”
But perhaps most surprising was the appearance of a modified Tesla Model Y that was tackling the dunes right alongside its more off-road-y counterparts.
We went to King of the Hammers on the 8th. Here’s a bit from it pic.twitter.com/RsvLOEvKxR
— omg_Tesla/Rivian (@omg_tesla) February 18, 2023
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With Ford’s history within the offroad performance truck market, there is no doubt that a higher performance off-road ready variant of the Lightning is on its way. Thanks to hints from Ford CEO Jim Farley, newer performance editions may be closer than we anticipate. Not to forget, with the Tesla Cybertruck just around the corner, Ford will likely be facing pressure from consumers to introduce higher-performance models to compete. The performance electric trucks we have all been hoping for are finally just around the corner.
What do you think of the article? Do you have any comments, questions, or concerns? Shoot me an email at william@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @WilliamWritin. If you have news tips, email us at tips@teslarati.com!
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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