Lifestyle
Tesla Model 3 police cruiser gives look at electric patrolling in ride-along video
A Tesla Model 3 has been patrolling the streets of Westport, Connecticut, since January 2020. However, an inside look at how effective the Model 3’s performance is for the law enforcement agency has never been given. That is until Westport Police Department Chief Foti Koskinas gave two members of the Now You Know YouTube channel a peek of how patrolling the streets of the small Connecticut town in an electric police car is advantageous for those who look to protect the community.
Teslarati initially reported in December 2019 that the Westport PD had chosen the Model 3 to be its new patrol unit. However, the work was far from over after ordering the vehicle, because the interior and exterior lights, sirens, and other worthy police cruiser necessities needed to be installed before the all-electric sedan could begin patrolling the town.
Chief Koskinas seems pleased with the Tesla’s performance during the first eight months of ownership, and efficiency and performance seem to be the main factors in his happiness thus far.
Along with the five-star crash safety ratings that the Model 3 offers, the range has helped the department as well. “The performance of getting over 300 miles, possibly on a charge, puts us in an area where we can run more than two shifts. We’re running about sixteen hours before we need a charge,” Koskinas said.
Koskinas also indicated that Tesla was more than willing to help the Westport PD outfit its new Model 3 with the proper tires, brakes, and other parts. However, the automaker was also keen to get the law enforcement staff the car in a reasonable amount of time. “We weren’t put on a waiting list,” the Chief said.
In terms of Tesla’s interior layout, the department stated that it has been working with the automaker’s team of engineers to keep the design minimalistic. Police Officers have multiple remote controls within the vehicle that are designed to control the lights and sirens. A more advantageous route, according to some officers in the unit, would like the steering wheel buttons or dash screen to incorporate these controls. It would undoubtedly improve the ease of access, providing a more accessible way to turn on police cruiser sirens and lights.
It seems the relationship between both Tesla and the Westport PD is respectful and constructive. Tesla could be using Westport’s cruiser as a way to learn about how it could improve its cars for law enforcement use. Other departments, like the Los Angeles Police Department and the Fremont PD, are utilizing Tesla Model S vehicles for patrol use. Still, it seems Westport’s Model 3 could be geared toward a wide rollout of all-electric law enforcement cars in the future.
This could be because of the Model 3’s affordability. While taxpayer dollars are used to buy new police cruisers for law enforcement agencies, affordability is still likely a large factor in determining what vehicle to purchase.
Keeping citizens happy is a big part of maintaining support for a police department. While Westport has the largest population of electric vehicles per capita than any other city in Connecticut, so the overall premise of the Model 3 was widely accepted. One driver in Westport with a Mustang GT pulled up next to an officer in the Model 3 and asked for a race. The officer replied, “Whether you’re faster or not, I will probably win.”
The driver of the Mustang said, “Beautiful car!”
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The Westport PD even held a meet and greet event when the Model 3 was ready for duty so that citizens could come to get a closer look at the new cruiser.
The Model 3 Police Cruiser has been a hit among the officers and citizens in Westport, and the ride-along that was offered to Jesse and Zac of Now You Know was a great look at how the all-electric sedan has worked its way into the life of law enforcement.
The full interview with Westport Police, along with the ride-along, is available 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
