Lifestyle
Self-driving car lanes are coming: Will they help or hinder Level 5 autonomy progress?
Tesla’s long-term Robotaxi plans require Level 5 autonomous driving, i.e., no humans involved, and it certainly sounds like things are moving along quite well. CEO Elon Musk has been chatting about the Full Self-Driving progress on Twitter lately, and some recently published patent applications by the all-electric carmaker have revealed even more details about the machine learning going into an Autopilot overhaul. However, Tesla’s self-driving competitors have another approach to autonomy in mind, and it involves infrastructure restructuring in a major way.
The State of Michigan recently announced plans to create transport lanes dedicated to self-driving vehicles via a public-private partnership project. Over the next 24 months, a study will be conducted to explore the opportunity and viability of building a 40-mile corridor of this type between Downtown Detroit and Ann Arbor. The company chosen to lead the effort is Cavnue, a subsidiary of Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners which is owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
Cavnue’s plans involve a digital model of a roadway that analyzes road conditions in real-time, shares information, and provides proactive guidance to autonomous vehicles and their (optional) drivers. Based on their published promo materials, this is achieved using layers of technologies like sensors, specialized road markings and signage, and signal hubs for transmitting information to vehicles. Essentially, rather than rely on a vehicle’s onboard self-driving software to analyze, predict, and respond to its environment, this connected infrastructure is supposed to provide that data instead – or supplement it heavily anyhow. It’s also supposed to enable the connected cars to talk to one another so coordinated responses like simultaneous braking, slowing, etc. are possible based on environmental factors from the larger infrastructure system.
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- Cavnue’s plan for self-driving dedicated vehicle lanes. (Source: Cavnue
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- Cavnue’s plan for self-driving dedicated vehicle lanes. (Source: Cavnue
As part of their role in Michigan, Cavnue will be drawing on an advisory committee with representatives from Ford, GM, Argo AI, Arrival, BMW, Honda, Toyota, TuSimple, and Waymo (also a subsidiary of Alphabet).
Both Tesla and Rivian are notably absent from the project’s advisory mentions, which isn’t surprising considering their competitor status through the Alphabet-Waymo connection. But if the lanes are going to involve both long hauler transportation and consumer vehicles, i.e., the Tesla Semi and Models S, 3, X, Y, etc., it must be assumed that the missing companies will eventually get on board with the overall connectivity imagined.
Could efforts like this affect the future of Level 5 autonomy in a negative way? Does it force companies like Tesla and Rivian into a self-driving standard dictated by, say, Waymo? Cavnue’s proposal says its standards will be “open” and “OEM-neutral” if implemented, so it could be a matter of a software install option for owners living in areas with these dedicated lanes. The ability for a competitor’s software to control their vehicles, though, might be a little too big an ask. Or would it?
Tesla is already under an atomic microscope anytime something goes wrong and Autopilot is (or isn’t) involved. What happens when Autopilot is taking a back seat to another OEM’s self-driving software that’s been adopted by a local government? Will that create a code mess to sort through for investigators? How would liability be handled? What if two updates didn’t play well together – something really common in phone and computer apps after OS updates?
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“The vision for the corridor is intended to create lanes that are purpose built to accelerate and enhance the full potential of CAVs [connected autonomous vehicles] and move people,” Michigan’s official announcement stated. Getting governments even more involved in the self-driving push is inevitable and already presents one of the biggest obstacles to its adoption. It’s clear from the Great Lakes State’s initiative that this involvement is also intended to be helpful – first by isolating the autonomous cars, then by supplementing their capabilities, and finally by controlling their movements for safety’s sake.
Of course, cars talking to one another isn’t a new or unexpected idea. Even centralizing the information that’s being shared, as proposed in Cavnue’s system, doesn’t seem to impose or hinder anything generally. A legal authority adopting a self-driving standard, though, is another matter. This concern assumes that the authority in question makes it a mandatory standard since millions, perhaps billions, would be invested into these dedicated roadways. What good would they be if the majority of autonomous vehicles that used them were, say, Teslas that don’t bother with the Waymo-developed system?
Then there’s the question of handicap. Once a system is in place to centralize all the environment information self-driving vehicles are supposed to respond to, will it make it more difficult for companies like Tesla to gain local regulatory approval to use their software? Will it disincentivize other companies from improving their software since there’s a centralized program available (or mandatory)? Level 5 autonomy is no easy feat, nor is it cheap to develop. Car maker’s invest in it expecting a return – like in the case of Tesla’s Robotaxi plan.
Cavnue paints a really safe and pretty picture for the future of self-driving vehicles: Less congestion, faster movement at closer distances, more capacity in the same space, reducing or eliminating choke points, etc. But it also seems to require a lot of cooperation from those who don’t necessarily stand to gain from that cooperation.
Whatever the answers, hopefully none will put much damper on current progress towards Level 5 autonomous driving. And if they do, perhaps The Boring Company will have a few big projects under its belt and ready to provide better answers.
You can watch Cavnue’s promotional concept video here.
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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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