Lifestyle
Tesla sends out invites for special Model 3 and S Winter Experience in Finland
Tesla is sending out emails inviting owners to sign up for a special winter-themed event this March. Dubbed as the “Tesla Winter Experience 2019,” the event will allow a number of lucky owners to experience the high-performance capabilities of the company’s vehicles in icy conditions firsthand. The event will be held at Kemi, Finland, and will involve the company’s all-wheel-drive variants of the Model S and Model 3.
As noted in Tesla’s message, owners and guests attending the event will be receiving a number of perks. Apart from enjoying an intense drive over an ice track accompanied by a professional driver, participants will be receiving complimentary travel, accommodation, as well as daily breakfast and lunch. A special dinner held at the Kemi SnowCastle — an iconic spot in Finland considered as the world’s largest snow fort — will also be offered to the event’s attendees. Following is the email Tesla recently sent out today.
“This March, we might bring you and a friend to the frozen sea in Finland.
“Sign up for a chance to experience a unique ice driving event with Model 3 and Model S in Europe. Enjoy Model 3 Track Mode and the unparalleled power and best-in-class acceleration of Model S as you race across a wintery ice track with a trained professional. Winners receive complimentary travel, room and board, and a special dinner at the Kemi SnowCastle.
“Share this with friends and family to participate.
In the event’s official webpage for North America, Tesla pointed out that the capabilities of Track Mode — the Model 3 Performance’s exclusive setting that allows the electric sedan to endure extended sessions of high-intensity driving — will be showcased in Winter Experience 2019. Tesla also explained some details behind its cars’ performance in icy conditions, stating that its AWD vehicles offer impressive traction thanks to their dual motors that digitally control torque to the front and rear wheels.
Tesla’s page for the event in Europe is headlined by the Model 3’s arrival in the country. The company also mentions an extra perk that was not included in the event’s North American page — a travel satchel from TUMI, one of the electric car maker’s partners. Below is a comparison between Tesla’s webpages for the Winter Experience 2019 for North America and Europe.
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- Tesla’s invitation for the Winter Experience 2019 event for North America. (Credit: Tesla)
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- Tesla’s invitation for the Winter Experience 2019 event for Europe. (Credit: Tesla)
Tesla’s invitations for the Winter Experience event for North America and Europe. (Credit: Tesla)
Tesla’s upcoming Winter Experience in Finland appears to be yet another program aimed at cultivating and strengthening the company’s engagement with its loyal customer base, while raising interest for the Model 3 in Europe at the same time. Considering that deliveries of the Model 3 to the region will likely be underway by the time the event is held, the Winter Experience would likely generate more buzz about the electric sedan, particularly among residents of the European region.
Tesla is now in the process of shipping the Model 3 to Europe. Reports indicate that Tesla is planning on shipping 3,000 Model 3 per week for the region, which will be comprised of Long Range and Performance versions of the vehicle. In his recent email to employees, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also noted that the company is attempting to start shipping the Mid Range Model 3 RWD to the international market sometime around May. That is, of course, until Tesla could begin producing the Model 3’s ever-elusive $35,000 Standard Range RWD version.
Watch Tesla’s teasers for the Winter Experience 2019 event in the clips 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.
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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.
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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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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
