It’s hard to miss all the headlines about the United States’ trade war with China, the stock market’s reaction to it, and the various industry struggles in response to it if you spend any decent amount of time online. Honestly, I’m not much of a finance person, i.e., I only learned what a ‘short seller’ was by following Tesla. But being a reporter on all things Elon Musk, I couldn’t help but wonder how the discord was going to affect the all-electric carmaker in both China sales and its Gigafactory 3 project in Shanghai.
Then, my wondering seemed to stumble upon an answer thanks to a fellow Teslarati writer’s coverage of the expansion of China’s Shanghai Free Trade Zone (FTZ) to Lingang, the area where Tesla’s newest facility is located. (Thanks, Simon!) As part of a continuing effort to open the country’s markets to economic globalization, Shanghai and Lingang are intended to form a free market region similar to Hong Kong. Goods entering the FTZ will be tax-exempt for the most part.
On its face, it appears Tesla will get to avoid most of the arguments between Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping.
The company was already moving towards Chinese tax reductions by being a local manufacturer, but some supplies will still need to come from its facilities in the US, not to mention the high-end variants of the Model 3 as well as the Model S and Model X, risking import games and the like – something an FTZ would eliminate. The FTZ will also come with promised cuts to corporate tax rates for preferred industries. I mean, it certainly sounds like a great deal for a company like Tesla.
“Customs authorities are supposed to ensure all the goods inside the zone are duty-free to boost commercial activities in the area,” Huang Yejing, a research professor at the Institute of World Economy at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, was quoted as saying in the South China Morning Post. So, anything Tesla imports to Giga 3 will be free from fee baggage on China’s side. However, Huang also said this:
“But they also need to make sure that those duty-free goods do not flow out of the zone and are sold on the domestic market. It is still an unanswered question facing regulators.”
Does that mean the benefits of the FTZ are eliminated once Tesla’s cars leave the area to be sold at stores? It sounds like it. Well, maybe not all the benefits. Their cars can be built under the best free-trade policies China has to offer (for now), and residents within the Shanghai area will probably have the best prices on their Tesla cars. Does this deal kind of operate like when city residents purchase their cars outside their cities to avoid higher taxes? Since Tesla sells its cars online, will that create a loophole to sell anywhere in the country under FTZ deals?
China has been very generous to Tesla and Musk in their Shanghai endeavors thus far, and with that under consideration, it seems the goodwill may last at least for the immediate future. Musk is also bringing The Boring Company to China at the end of August, so China’s leadership obviously sees good things for China coming from his ventures.
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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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![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner-80x80.jpg)
