Lifestyle
Tesla is finalist in prestigious advocacy and customer experience award
Tesla Motors, Inc. has been identified as one of three finalists for the Extole Advocacy and Customer Experience (ACE) Award. Extole, the leading advocate marketing platform, recognizes brands that turn customers into advocates with exceptional referral marketing programs. Tesla has one of the world’s most acclaimed refer-a-friend programs, and Extole’s nod to Tesla reflects the view that customers acquired through advocate referral programs spend more, are more loyal, and are more likely to refer their friends to the brand.
“We know that without our customers we would not be where we are today,” Tesla shares on its website. Their Referral Program is a substantial way of thanking customers for their “support in building the Tesla community.”
Extole describes Tesla Motors as follows:
“Tesla Motors created a movement around its innovative products and its mission, and the brand is equally as inspiring with its marketing. The company relies almost exclusively on its community of brand advocates to promote its products and offers one of the most well-known referral programs available to consumers. With a disdain for paid advertising, Tesla Motors is leading the trend of reaching new customers through existing ones.”
The current Tesla Referral Program began October 16 and will run until January 15, 2017. Anyone who orders a new Model S or Model X during this period using the referral link of a Tesla owner will get a $1,000 credit towards the purchase price. Tesla demonstrates its appreciation to referring owners through a system of Referral Program awards:
- 10 Qualifying Referrals: Those who make 10 qualifying referrals will receive an invitation for them and a guest to attend the next Tesla unveiling event;
- 7+ Qualifying Referrals: Those who make 7 or more qualifying referrals will receive an exclusive red Founders Series Powerwall 2, hand signed by Elon Musk, JB Straubel, and Franz von Holzhausen. This limited edition Powerwall is not available to the public;
- 5+ Qualifying Referrals: Those who make 5 qualifying referrals will receive an invitation for them and a guest to take an extended VIP tour of the Tesla Factory in Fremont, California, including a Q&A with Franz von Holzhausen, Tesla’s Chief Designer;
- 3+ Qualifying Referrals: Those who make 3 or more referrals will receive an exclusive thermal Tesla Owners Jacket;
- 2+ Qualifying Referrals: Those who make 2 or more qualifying referrals will receive a Tesla carry-on.
- Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X Drawing: Each qualified referral a Tesla customer makes gives her or him an additional entry into a drawing to win the choice of either a Ludicrous P100D Model S or Model X.
The annual ACE Award is now in its second year. Along with Tesla, Hanna Andersson and Ulta Beauty have received ACE Award nominations due to their successes as they engage existing advocates in the process of helping to acquire new customers. The criteria for the ACE Award speak to each finalists’ refer-a-friend program with regard to creativity, breadth, and overall success.
“Advocacy goes beyond being nice to your customers,” said Matt Roche, Extole’s founder and CEO. Extole helps brands to harness the power of online sharing to the benefit of their bottom line. It enables marketers to scale word-of-mouth to acquire new customers and increase loyalty using their greatest competitive advantage: their customers. “Customer-centric companies recognize and reward customers, making them part of the brand. Our finalists are exemplars and are all worthy of this award. Only one, however, will win.”
Tweet @teslamotors and congratulate them as finalists for its second annual #ACE award! Tell them #teslarati sent you.
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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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