Lifestyle
Tesla ridesharing video shows how Model 3 wins over potential electric car customers
Tesla is a unique carmaker in the way that it does not advertise like traditional auto companies. Over the years, Tesla’s brand got stronger mostly through word-of-mouth. Now that the company is already producing its first attempt at a mass-market car, its advertisement strategies are still pretty much the same. Save for a couple of promotional videos shared online from time to time, Tesla’s primary means of promoting its brand is still its customer base.
This was recently depicted in a video shared by YouTube tech reviewer Andy Slye. The YouTuber, who took delivery of his Long Range RWD Model 3 earlier this year, admits that he is not really a “car guy.” What he does know inside and out, though, is tech. And when it comes to tech, Syle has noted that his Tesla Model 3 is one of the best cars on the road today. One of the YouTuber’s recent uploads featured him picking up Uber and Lyft riders on his electric car. During the drive, he would show his passengers some of the Model 3’s features and capabilities. As could be seen in Syle’s video, sometimes, it only takes some firsthand experience to encourage someone to purchase a Tesla.
Immediately notable in Syle’s video were the reactions incited by the Model 3 from its passengers. Components of the vehicle, such as its 15″ touchscreen, its tinted glass roof, as well as its minimalistic interior, immediately became a point of conversation. The car’s smooth ride and drive, as well as its power and acceleration, notably impressed the car’s riders, while Autopilot’s capabilities proved compelling as well. By the end of their rides, practically all of Syle’s passengers were won over by the Model 3, and some even noted that they would likely get one for themselves.
Ultimately, the tech YouTuber’s recently uploaded clip is a glimpse into how Tesla’s electric cars win over potential customers. Tesla has one of the most dedicated communities of owners out there, to the point where owners volunteered to pitch in at the end of the third quarter to help the company deliver as many vehicles as it can before September ended. As could be seen in social media, Tesla owners give test rides to their friends and family frequently, and the result is usually another electric car being purchased from the company.
https://twitter.com/Andrew31889/status/1047713117134708741
https://twitter.com/megangale/status/1048403696613085184
In a way, it is the Tesla experience that really has a tendency to win over potential customers. The stigma of electric cars being “soulless” or “boring” has been around for a long time, and the skepticism about the capabilities of premium electric cars are still abounding. That said, test drives are usually enough to convince even veteran “car guys” that Tesla’s electric cars are every bit as capable and powerful (perhaps even more) than the best high-performance vehicles in the market. Such an experience was shared recently by a longtime BMW owner, who was won over by the Tesla Model 3 Performance after test driving the vehicle.
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The company addressed the power of experiencing Tesla’s electric cars firsthand during the Q2 2018 earnings call. While discussing the ongoing rollout of the Model 3, Tesla global head of sales Robin Ren noted that sometimes, even customers who have no idea what the Model 3 is end up ordering the vehicle after a test drive.
“I think that’s something that we found super exciting, because these are the people who actually had no idea about Model 3 and they heard about Model 3 is available to order, many of them requested test drives. And since early July, we have over 60,000 test drive requests in the U.S. alone and these people come into our stores, do the test drive, and they become super excited, and they decide to order the car,” he said.
Watch the Model 3 impress its Uber and Lyft riders in the video below.
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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