Lifestyle
Watch this Tesla Model S conquer Autocross [Video]
The following post was originally published on EVANNEX
Grant M. is like a superhero with a secret identity – during the week, he works as a lawyer, but on the weekends, he takes his Tesla S60 to the autocross track to do battle with the forces of fossil fuel.
Autocross, also called solo or (in Canada) autoslalom, is a timed competition in which drivers navigate a course that includes straightaways, curves and slaloms. It’s less about fast acceleration and high speed than about handling and precision driving. The autocross community is egalitarian – any kind of car can compete, and drivers of all skill levels are welcome. Courses are usually temporary, set up with cones on a speedway parking lot or a disused airstrip – this prevents experienced drivers from gaining an advantage, as the course may be different every time.
According to the Sports Car Club of America, most autocross courses are designed so that the cars won’t exceed normal highway speeds – around 55-60 mph. However, “that doesn’t mean they are slow. Well-designed courses will feel plenty fast as you attempt to maintain that speed through a series of elements. Imagine slaloming every barrel in a 55-mph construction zone, and you will start to get the idea.” As the New Brunswick Sporting Car Club puts it, “While AutoSlalom events typically involve lower speeds than other motorsports, the number of driver inputs per second is comparable to Formula One.”
Driving an electric vehicle (EV) on the autocross track is very different from driving a gas-burner. The EV’s instant acceleration gives it an advantage coming out of corners onto a straightaway. However there’s also a drawback: EVs, especially the Tesla Model S, weigh a lot more than their gas-powered counterparts. “Trying to take a corner fast and hard with a car that weighs 4,500 to 5,000 pounds” isn’t easy, Grant told us. “I’m probably 1,000 to 1,500 pounds heavier than every other car in my class.”
Regenerative braking presents another challenge. “It’s like engine braking, as if you were downshifting. You have to take that into account too – it can slow you down pretty far on a really sharp corner, and sometimes that can lead to the back end of the car sweeping out, just because while you’re braking and taking a turn, you lose contact with the tires.”
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In a sense, an EV has the opposite attributes of a gas car: it’s slower in the tight turns, but faster on the straight sections. Grant’s competitors know they have to watch out for the Tesla on the straightaways. “I can’t take the corners as fast as everybody else, but when I see a straightaway, with my instant torque and acceleration I can make up some time.”
The Model S is not an ideal autocross car, so Grant doesn’t expect to win a first-place finish any time soon, but his times are improving, and he often earns a respectable place in the top 3 to 5. “It’s very hard to beat cars that are made by the manufacturers to actually go on tracks.” The BMW M3 seems to be the number-one competitor. “They’re very fast and much smaller.”
Grant competes at SCCA events in Southern California in the F Street class, in which cars must be totally stock – the only modification allowed is the tires, so some drivers opt to use “stickier” models. He’s the only Tesla driver on the Southern Cal autocross scene (and apparently the only EV driver, though he has seen a couple of Volts at events), so he and his car get a lot of attention.
Although he’s the only electric driver among a field of car guys and motorheads, Grant says he has encountered no chauvinism or hostility – on the contrary, most of the other drivers find his Tesla Model S very interesting, and are excited about the technology (he does hear some jokes about his vehicle’s silence). This being Southern California, some of the other drivers own Teslas themselves, although they prefer to bring their M3s or Corvettes to the autocross track.
In fact, Grant has become something of a Tesla ambassador to the autocross community – all the car guys have heard about the P100D and its 2.2-second 0-60 time, but he has educated many of them about nifty features such as Autopilot. Everybody wants to take the Model S for a spin, and we all know how that often ends up – it’s possible that Grant has inspired a car guy or two to buy a Tesla of their own.
And why shouldn’t you follow his example? Autocross events are held in all 50 states, and beginning racers are welcome. If you’ve ever wondered how your Model S might perform on a track, an autocross event could be a good place to find out. You’ll have fun, improve your driving skills, and help to spread the word about driving electric.
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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.
Tesla unlocks in-car web conferencing to extend Google Meet, Teams and beyond
Tesla Summer Update begins rolling out: a look at the new features
