Lifestyle
Tesla Model 3 gets attacked by road-raging BMW driver after parking lot encounter
A Tesla owner had no idea that his Model 3 will be the victim of a road rage incident after he encountered a BMW in a parking lot at Carmel Mountain Ranch in San Diego, CA. The incident, which transpired after the Model 3 owner briefly called out the BMW driver, resulted in what could very well be some costly repairs for the electric sedan.
Cory Janney and his wife were doing a simple run to a Best Buy outlet at The Courtyard shopping center last Saturday when they passed a gray BMW, which pulled through a stop sign just as the Tesla Model 3 was pulling in. Janney pressed on his vehicle’s horn briefly in response. Thinking nothing of the incident, the couple then parked their electric car and went inside the store.
They were only inside for around six minutes, but by the time they returned to their Model 3, they were greeted by paint shavings on their vehicle and a long, deep gash across the electric car’s front passenger side door. Speaking to ABC10 News, Janney noted that he and his wife did not expect their vehicle to get attacked from such a brief, seemingly normal parking lot encounter. “We were both pretty shocked,” he said.
Reviewing the dashcam footage from their Model 3, Janney and his wife saw what appeared to be the very same BMW that they encountered park beside their Tesla. The BMW driver then exited his vehicle and looked around, seemingly surveying the area and checking if he parked beside the right electric car. When he went back into the line of sight of the Model 3’s dashcam, the BMW driver had something small and sharp in his hands. He then proceeded to walk towards the Model 3’s passenger side. “He had a stiff arm and proceeded to scratch the passenger side of the door, before getting back into the vehicle,” Janney said.
The damage to the Model 3’s paint was quite significant, as the scratch was deep enough to go past the vehicle’s clear coat and paint. The Model 3 owner has not received an estimate for his vehicle’s repair yet, though a consultant informed ABC10 that the scratch could cost the Tesla owner several thousand dollars. Fortunately, a police report has been filed against the BMW driver, whose face was clearly visible in the Model 3’s dashcam footage. And since incidents such as these are considered a felony in the area, the BMW driver might soon regret attacking the Model 3.
Janney, for his part, hopes that the road-raging BMW driver could be located by the authorities soon. “It’s disturbing (that) something so small could lead to so much rage. If he gets this frustrated, who knows if he’s going to escalate it to something bigger,” he said.
Teslas are becoming a lot more common today with the advent of vehicles like the Model 3. Despite this, the company remains polarizing for several groups of people, some of whom seemed to have developed a strong dislike for Teslas and their infrastructure. This has been displayed in ICE-ing incidents, which involve gas-powered cars intentionally blocking EV charging stations, and even an instance involving a vandal who attempted to sever the wires of a Tesla Supercharger. In response to these, Tesla has rolled out several safety updates for its vehicles, such as improvements to its fleet’s built-in dashcam features and Sentry Mode, an upgraded alarm suite designed to discourage thieves from breaking into an electric car.
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Watch ABC10‘s feature on a Tesla Model 3’s unfortunate encounter with a road-raging BMW driver in the video below.
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
