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It appears there’s finally a tech area where legacy automakers can keep up with Tesla – keyless car entry and ignition.
They’ve been trying various versions out for a number of years already, but now that Tesla has upped the game by creating a computer on wheels, the tech is getting a near-universal addition on all new cars. According to an Edmunds report cited by CBS, 91% of vehicle models produced for 2019 have keyless ignitions as either standard or optional, a feature that Tesla was first to offer. This is up from 72% offered in 2014. Of vehicles purchased, nearly 70% included keyless tech in 2019, more than doubling the 31% from 2014. Clearly, consumers are being won over.
I remember some early security criticism when keyless entry was making the rounds, both the over-the-top kind and some with accompanying evidence. Personally, my old Jeep fob used to be able to unlock other cars sometimes in large parking lots, so security issues rang true to me, too. I also remembered stories about people hacking other people’s computers and phones simply by grabbing their WiFi or Bluetooth signals. If they could access my banking that easily, my car should be no match. Scary!
I swear there was a keyless car tech Luddite Award waiting somewhere with my name on it.
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Tesla one-upped all that with the Model 3 – now you can start your car with your phone and soon drive it as well. The amped-up security seems to make it near impossible to hack into, but I’ve seen videos on how people can potentially clone signals when Tesla owners are at Superchargers. Quite difficult, but not totally impossible. Then again, the car is still a computer with a gazillion ways to be tracked. I’ve seen those stories, too, and it seems there’s a reason the number of successfully stolen Tesla cars hovers in the single digits.
All that said, Tesla seems to have Luddite concerns all wrapped up with their vehicles, but what about legacy auto? Fortunately for them, not every capable computer programmer in the world works at Tesla already. In fact, many of them already work for automakers. It seems every manufacturer already has software development centers and divisions dedicated exclusively to their vehicle tech, and they’ve been recruiting from Silicon Valley for years.
Their battery and self-driving tech might be woefully behind Tesla for a while yet, but apps that electronically tell their car to do things it already knows how to do manually? They should have that in the bag soon. Lincoln is about to introduce keyless ignition next year, so it’s quite likely the rest of the gang will follow suit since they’re already halfway there with keyless entry and app-based auto start functions to pre-warm cars.
It’s a small step, but an important one. Perhaps by following Tesla’s lead in computerizing (app-ifying?) nearly everything in their vehicles, they’ll understand a bit better what makes Tesla so unique. They’ll understand why Tesla’s tech is so appealing. They’ll understand why consumers are embracing what Tesla has to offer.
I mean, we probably won’t all embrace the tech quite on the level that Amie DD has and literally make keyless ignition a physical part of our bodies, but we will probably embrace it to the extent that we have let our phones run most of our lives.
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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