Lifestyle
Tesla Full Self-Driving gives epileptic student hope for normalcy
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving and Autopilot capabilities aim to create a safer driving environment for everyone on the road. But for one college student, the option to have the functionality has given hope that traveling at her leisure could be possible one day, as her epilepsy has prohibited her from ever obtaining a driver’s license.
Lauren, a student at a Michigan college, shared her story on the r/TeslaMotors subreddit, stating that her first seizures came at an extremely young age. Because of her condition, the possibility of her ever driving became minimal, as the risk of spontaneous seizures impaired her ability to operate a vehicle safely.
“I had my first febrile seizure at five months old,” Lauren told Teslarati. “I have focal impaired epilepsy and absence seizures, so it went unnoticed until I was 17. My parents didn’t keep up with a neurologist.”
According to Epilepsy.com, Focal Impaired Awareness Seizures start in one area or side of the brain, and the person is not aware of their surroundings. These episodes last around 1 to 2 minutes typically, and include automatisms such as lip-smacking, fumbling, wandering, and grunting or moaning.
Lauren said another one of her symptoms included asking “weird, obvious questions.” One time during an episode, Lauren “asked her boyfriend who he was and where she was when they were at his apartment.” Along with the Focal Impaired Awareness Seizures, Lauren also has experienced Nocturnal Seizures, which occurred once a week.
Laws in most states allow drivers with epilepsy to obtain a license without much of an issue. WebMD stated that 700,000 drivers in the United States have a license, but it all depends on the type and frequency of the seizures.
Lauren has not been able to obtain a license because of her types of seizures. Effectively losing the ability to focus on surroundings would create a dangerous driving environment for everyone on the road, which has been Lauren’s main issue in her quest to drive a car. In her home state of Michigan, Neurologists are not required to disclose information to the DMV about an epileptic condition. Still, she believes cars with FSD capabilities would significantly improve her chances of driving a car herself.
For her, it would make life convenient and more affordable. “I’m looking forward to lowering my weekly Uber cost, being able to go grocery shopping without having to worry about running out of food, and being able to go to therapy.”
-
A sense of normalcy in terms of traveling would provide Lauren the opportunity to be less dependent on others when performing regular, everyday tasks, and she believes Tesla is onto something with FSD.
She admits that at first, she was convinced she would never be able to afford one. “I always thought that they were out of my price range due to David Dobrik having one.” However, she looked into the Model 3 and found out that the car is affordable, which gives her hope.
David Dobrik’s Tesla launch does not define his love for the company
But for Lauren, FSD wouldn’t just change her life, but it would revolutionize driving and travel for those who suffer from similar conditions. “I just think more people would be able to drive and safely drive.”
Ultimately, Tesla FSD and fully-autonomous capabilities are a few years away. CEO Elon Musk has hinted in the past that Level 5 Autonomy is at least a few years away, but he is confident it will eventually be available for Tesla owners to take advantage of to make driving a routine way of life.
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.
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.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
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.
-
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.
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.
-
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
