Lifestyle
Stealthy Tesla Model 3 bullies muscle cars and tuned imports in multiple drag races
The Tesla Model 3 is becoming more and more commonplace in the United States. With its ubiquity, the electric sedan is now being spotted rather frequently in drag races, just like its larger siblings — the Model S and X. And just like the Model S and X, the Model 3 is also gaining a reputation for being a serious contender in straight-line races.
One such Model 3 recently made an appearance in a drag strip meet at the SDCCU Stadium in San Diego, CA, where it battled several vehicles including muscle cars, souped-up imports, and even a couple of roaring SUVs in intense 1/8-mile races. Just like a mysterious blue Model 3 that dominated a series of drag races earlier this year, the exact trim of the stealthy red electric sedan that competed in the recent event was not announced. Based on how well the vehicle performed and how it beat its opponents, though, the car was likely a Model 3 Performance or a Long Range Model 3 AWD.
The vehicle in the video, which was uploaded on YouTube’s auto-themed 7zerex channel, did not have a Dual Motor badge or a carbon fiber rear spoiler. The electric sedan did not seem to be equipped with red brake calipers as well, as could be seen from the gaps of its aftermarket wheels. That said, the Model 3 was also fitted with what appeared to be 20″ Michelin Pilot Sport 4S wheels, which were released for the Performance variant.
The electric sedan battled numerous fossil fuel-powered vehicles during its drag racing session. Included among the Model 3’s opponents were a muscle car and several tuned imports, all of which were thoroughly dominated by the electric sedan. Only one vehicle was able to give the Model 3 a run for its money in the uploaded video — an SUV that seemingly managed to beat the electric car off the line. At the midpoint of its race with the SUV, though, the Model 3 appeared to have caught up with the gas guzzler.
Since the vehicle’s release, the Model 3 has been proving itself as a vehicle capable of performing well both on the drag strip and on the track. Over the past few months, the Model 3 has battled several formidable vehicles like the McLaren 570S, and it was able to hold its own very well. In another RaceLegal.com-sponsored event, a Model 3 Performance actually managed to outrun a Dodge Demon in a 1/8-mile race — a feat that is incredibly impressive since the muscle car was designed to beat the Model S P100D, the Model 3 Performance’s larger, quicker sibling.
When the Model 3 was unveiled back in 2016, Elon Musk candidly remarked that Tesla does not “make slow cars.” Considering the specs of the Model 3 that have been released so far, Musk’s statement definitely appears to ring true. Even the Mid Range Model 3 RWD — Tesla’s most conservative variant of the vehicle — has acceleration that is comparable to a muscle car, with its 0-60 mph time of 5.6 seconds and its top speed of 125 mph. The two dual motor variants of the vehicle — the Long Range Model 3 AWD and the Model 3 Performance — are even more impressive, with the former having a 0-60 mph time of 4.5 seconds and a top speed of 145 mph, and the latter featuring a 0-60 mph time of 3.5 seconds and a top speed of 155 mph.
Watch the stealthy Model 3 battle opponents in the video below.
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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
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