Lifestyle
Tesla community mobilizes to help in Elon Musk’s end-of-Q2 push: Here’s why they do it
Tesla volunteers are mobilizing once more to help the electric car maker deliver as many vehicles as it can before the end of the second quarter. These volunteer-driven initiatives are happening not only in the United States, but in foreign territories as well. Earlier this month, for example, reports emerged stating that Tesla owners from Beijing are volunteering their time and effort to help the company hand over electric cars to new buyers.
This remarkable community-driven initiative initially started out of necessity amidst Tesla’s efforts to hit profitability back in Q3 2018, but it quickly evolved into something of a tradition among electric car enthusiasts. For some Tesla owners, volunteering their time and helping the company is a worthwhile endeavor, and it is something that they do not mind doing every quarter. This is true for the Tesla Owners Silicon Valley group, who visited three Tesla locations this Friday to deliver over 100 donuts for the electric car maker’s employees.
For John, the president of the group, doing something as simple as sharing food for the company’s workers goes a long way, particularly at the current time where the narrative surrounding the company is persistently negative. “We love the Tesla brand. Unfortunately, the media is cutting them down any chance they get. It’s like kicking a horse that’s down. We do small things like volunteering at the delivery center and giving donuts to show our appreciation,” he wrote in a message to Teslarati.
Tesla’s volunteer-driven end-of-quarter initiatives are incredibly unique simply because they caught on despite the pervading negativity around the company. When Elon Musk initially responded positively to owner-enthusiast Ryan McCaffrey’s suggestion that the company accept help from volunteers last year, Tesla was mocked incessantly. Auto-themed website Jalopnik, for one sarcastically dubbed the community-driven program as a way for the billionaire Musk to tap into “free labor from generous, giving fans.” Undeterred, the community helped nonetheless, and it resulted in Tesla posting a profit in Q3 2018.
Perhaps critics find it difficult to rationalize why regular Tesla owners are open to volunteering their time and effort to help the electric car maker. In this sense, it appears that one must have a personal encounter with one of the company’s creations to understand why Tesla commands such a strong following, both among owners and enthusiasts alike.
Marques Brownlee, a Model S owner better known on YouTube as MKBHD, noted that it is really all about the product when it comes to Tesla. Narrating his experiences with the company in a message to Teslarati, the prolific tech YouTuber, who has used and reviewed his own fair share of hyped products over the years, noted that he became comfortable talking about Tesla when he developed a passion for its electric cars. “The main thing that got me to talk about Tesla is the product itself. The company could have all the hype in the world, and all the greatest incentives, but if the product didn’t live up to it, everything would fall flat for me. But testing and now owning the car was all it took for me to develop a passion for the product, just like I have for many other tech products in the past,” Brownlee wrote in a message to Teslarati.
Tesla owner-enthusiast and Ride the Lightning podcast host Ryan McCaffrey is on the same camp. Being an enthusiast long before he owned his Model 3 Performance, McCaffrey stated that there is just something unique and remarkable about the company’s creations. “It’s the products. No one would care as deeply about Tesla as many in the community do if the products weren’t incredible. It’s why one test drive is all it takes to convert so many new owners. It’s an instant, oh-my-goodness-this-is-amazing experience,” he wrote.
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Some owners even go above and beyond with their efforts to introduce new electric car buyers to the Tesla ecosystem. Among these is longtime Tesla owner Vivianna Van Deerlin, who, together with her husband, created an actual “Tesla Boot Camp” program for new owners. For the Van Deerlins, Tesla has become much more than a simple company that just happens to make excellent, compelling electric cars. “The company inspires us because they have a mission (that’s) important for humanity. It is bigger than just the corporation,” Vivianna wrote.
A look at the later portions of Tesla’s 2019 Annual Shareholder Meeting shows that similar sentiments run across the company’s investors. During the Q&A portion of the meeting, several shareholders brought up the issue of the overwhelmingly negative narrative surrounding the company, and it showed a level of empathy for a company that rarely seen. Some even personally offered to help address the misinformation surrounding Tesla. Musk admitted that the constant negativity thrown at Tesla is distressing, though he, together with CTO JB Straubel and VP for Tech Drew Baglino, thanked the shareholders for being the electric car maker’s line of defense. “Customer testimony and referrals are the key to our sales,” Musk said.
So what is it really about Tesla that makes it easy for owners to become enthusiasts? Perhaps it is the company’s mission of accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy, or perhaps it is the flourishing community that has, in multiple instances, shown empathy towards its members. Regardless, it appears that Tesla, at this point, has pretty much become an idea; one that represents the possibility of a more sustainable future. And as history would show us, it takes far more than an aggressively negative narrative to bring down an idea.
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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.
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.
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
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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