Connect with us

Lifestyle

Tesla owners are catching the #frunkpuppy fever: Here’s the story behind the trend

[Credit: Earl Banning/Twitter]

Published

8 years ago

on

Every Friday, an increasing number of Tesla owners are taking photographs of pets in their electric cars’ frunks. Fondly dubbed as #frunkpuppyfriday, the adorable, lighthearted trend has started spreading across the Tesla community, reaching even high-profile owners such as Maye Musk herself. With the Friday photo sessions almost becoming routine among Tesla owners, it appears that the frunkpuppy fever will be around for quite some time.

This the story of the frunkpuppy trend — a look behind the frunk, if you will.

Tesla Model 3 owner Earl Banning works as an active duty Air Force neuropsychologist. As part of his work, he performs cognitive testing for active duty military personnel and retirees. The neuropsychologist opted to start a Twitter account in May to follow Tesla updates from Elon Musk, and before the month was over, he took delivery of his Model 3 — a black Long Range RWD variant that’s fully loaded with Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. In June, his Model 3 received software update v8.1(2018.24.1), and with it, his vehicle gained the capability to be summoned through the Tesla app.

Earl posted a short video of his Model 3 pulling into his garage without a driver. The clip was picked up by Tesla’s official Twitter account, and later, retweeted by Elon Musk himself. As his following grew due to Elon Musk’s retweet, the neuropsychologist and pet enthusiast started posting images of his dog in his Model 3’s frunk. Things started taking off, and Norman, his labradoodle, even became a sponsor of an accessory for the Model 3. Earl also began to make connections in the TSLA Twitter community, all the while dealing with the TSLAQ group, some of whom were accusing him of faking his Model 3’s Summon video or being a paid Tesla supporter.

Tragedy struck in July. The neuropsychologist’s wife encountered a sudden and severe health issue, resulting in her being rushed to the ER and almost passing away. Doctors were not optimistic, stating that the likely outcome would either be death or severe cognitive impairment. Banning stayed in the hospital with his wife for around a month as she battled her illness, distracting himself by interacting with the online Tesla community. At one point, he opted to share his situation and his fears with other Tesla owners, and he found both support and catharsis. As luck would have it, the #frunkpuppy trend started gaining ground at this time as well.

Earl’s wife would eventually beat the odds. Though recovery will take a year, her life was no longer in danger. Earl’s frunkpuppy pictures started gaining ground online as well. Eventually, Trevor from the Model 3 Owners Club, who has a strong social media following, tweeted a picture of his cat in his car. Other social media influencers started picking up the trend. Dogs were followed by birds, rabbits, guinea pigs, and cats. One Tesla owner even shared an image of a snake inside a frunk.

On October, the frunkpuppy trend struck gold. Maye Musk retweeted a frunkpuppy photo, promising that she would do a shoot with her dog as soon as she is able. Late October, she did just that, posting a rather fashionable picture of her rescue dog inside her electric car’s frunk. Her image was voted by the Tesla community as the best #frunkpuppyfriday photo of the week.

Advertisement
-
-

Earl admits that he doesn’t really know where the frunkpuppy trend will go. He dreams of eventually getting enough referrals to get a Roadster, then using the car for charity. At some point in the future, he hopes to start a nonprofit that helps veterans, stroke survivors, and traumatic brain injury (TBI) victims, or even one that gives people with disabilities access to Teslas with Full Self-Driving capabilities. In a message to Teslarati, the Model 3 owner notes that while such a scenario is unlikely, it doesn’t hurt to be optimistic.

“Will all this happen? Odds are not likely. But my amazing wife beat all odds, survived and will fully recover. My two daughters love frunkpuppy and Teslas, and they get to keep their mom in their life. This thought brings tears of joy, so I’m here dreaming big. Tesla’s mission is sustainable energy and less pollution. I want that for them,” he said.

There is no denying that Tesla is a polarizing company, attracting an equal number of avid supporters and aggressive skeptics. Amidst the volatility of the company’s stock and the drama surrounding Elon Musk, though, there is a community of owners that are simply happy and content with their electric cars — a community that is warming up to the idea of Friday pet photoshoots in their vehicles’ frunk.

Related Topics:

Simon is an experienced automotive reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday. For stories or tips--or even to just say a simple hello--send a message to his email, simon@teslarati.com or his handle on X, @ResidentSponge.

Advertisement
Comments

Lifestyle

Tesla’s driverless Cybercab just passed a big test with State Governor

Florida’s governor rode Tesla’s Cybercab at a closed test track and called the experience impressive.

Published

2 days ago

on

August 13, 2026

By

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rode in a Tesla Cybercab on a closed test track this week and came away impressed, posting on X that the vehicle “successfully navigated all hazards — a kid running into the street, a crash with police stopping traffic, a Model S cutting us off, etc.” He called the ride “impressive.”

The stop was part of a broader event Monday at SunTrax, a 775 acre state owned proving ground in Auburndale that Florida built specifically to test autonomous and connected vehicles before they reach public roads. Standing next to a gold Cybercab, DeSantis described the car in plain terms: “You go in there and you just sit. You have a screen. There’s no steering wheel, no pedals. Clearly these things could be very beneficial.”

DeSantis paired the praise with a caveat that has followed autonomous vehicles since the category existed. “You don’t want to be in an autonomous vehicle and it drives you into a ditch. That would not be good,” he said, framing safety validation as the gate before wider deployment.

SunTrax, the 2.25 mile oval which the state calls the only high speed autonomous vehicle test track in the Southeast, can simulate rain, pedestrian crossings, hills and crowded urban conditions at highway speeds, letting companies push a car past what an early public rollout would risk. Tesla, Waymo and Beep all use the facility, and Florida’s regulatory approach, among the most permissive for autonomous vehicles in the country, doesn’t require a human operator inside a fully autonomous car.

Advertisement
-
-

Tesla has reason to want the blessing of Florida and states beyond, as the Cybercab entered volume production at Gigafactory Texas this spring and has since self certified as SAE Level 4 under Texas law. Public road testing so far has kept a safety monitor in the passenger seat, and Florida is where Tesla has been expanding its existing Model Y based Robotaxi service instead, adding Miami in July and then Orlando and Tampa two weeks later. A closed track endorsement from a sitting governor doesn’t change any of that, but it does put Tesla’s newest hardware in front of a state that has already shown it will move fast on rules.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space

Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.

Published

5 days ago

on

August 10, 2026

By

Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.

The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.


The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.

By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.

SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete

Advertisement
-
-

The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.

None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.

Continue Reading

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.

Published

1 week ago

on

August 7, 2026

By

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.

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.

Advertisement
-
-

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.

Continue Reading