Lifestyle
Tesla Model S Front Trunk (Frunk) Electric Cooler Review
Now that Tesla Motors has officially demonstrated to the world that long distance and even cross-country travel in a Tesla is easily attainable – annihilating the age-old lexicon “EV range anxiety” from everyone’s vocabulary – we thought it might be appropriate to review a product that would maintain the quality of perishables during these extended road trips.
We were on a mission to find a container that would be lightweight, portable and provides thermoelectric cooling / heating capabilities and came across the Koolatron Soft-Sided Electric Travel Cooler.
Koolatron 26-Quart Soft-Sided Electric Travel Cooler
What we really liked about the Koolatron is that it’s designed with the everyday traveler in mind. The thermoelectric cooler has a generous 26-quart capacity and outfitted with several compartments, most of which are secured through zippered pockets.
We found that the ergonomics of the soft-sided design combined with the detachable shoulder strap makes it more comfortable to lug around than your traditional hard-sided cooler.
A 12V electric fan is attached to the thick thermo lining and together they ensure that the contents of the cooler are kept at optimal temperatures while you’re on the go.
Product Specifications
- Soft-sided thermoelectric travel cooler with 12V, cigarette-lighter car adapter
- Detachable shoulder strap
- Bungee cord holds extra items to the lid of the cooler
- External zippered pockets for storage
- Mesh interior pocket
- 2 external beverage holders
- Cell phone pocket
- Holds 26 quarts or up to 34 12-ounce cans
- Cord pocket keeps the 12V cord out of the way when you’re on the move
- Keeps food and drinks 30°F below ambient temperatures
- Measures 9 by 17.5 by 15 inches; weighs 7 pounds
How does it fit within the Tesla Model S?
The first thing to note is that the Koolatron Soft-Sided Electric Travel Cooler
Its 26-quart capacity can easily accommodate a full set of plastic ware and beverage containers.
Despite its tall dimension, the travel cooler fits perfectly within the Tesla Model S front trunk (Frunk), 
when positioned onto its side, which further validates how great the Model S is when it comes to storage capacity (more on that in a separate article to come). The bungee cords on the top lid can be extended outwards and used as a means to secure the cooler from movement during travel.
Editors’ note: The Tesla Model S front trunk cargo net may provide better security in the event of emergency braking.
One notable feature of the Koolatron Electric Travel Cooler is that that it’s soft-sided which makes it easy to transport and secure within tight spaces. This is especially the case when fitting the cooler within the interior of the Model S.
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The cooler can be placed onto the empty center channel floor once the external beverage holders are folded down. Keeping the cooler between the two front seats means that there’s no lateral movement while the car’s in motion, kept away from children, and also adds an element of convenient when trying to dine-in-car (à la Bjorn Nyland).
The Koolatron Soft-Sided Electric Travel Cooler fits snugly between the arm rest assembly and touchscreen.
Tip: Those with the optional CCI can either place the cooler on top or along the floor of the 2nd row seating.
How does the electric cooler work?
As its name implies, the Koolatron 26-Quart Soft-Sided Electric Travel Cooler is made for travel and not meant to be used as a refrigerator or toaster oven. The electric fan is great for extracting warm air from within, but we found that bringing contents from room temperature to 30°F below ambient temperatures, as marketed, could be a lofty goal. That being said, it’s great at maintaining temperature and contents that are pre-chilled remain chilled for a long time while the cooler is plugged in.
The cooler comes standard with a 12V cigarette-lighter adapter which plugs directly into the Model S center console assembly. Reversing the orientation of the cable from blue to red will enable the heating capabilities of the travel cooler, making it convenient to keep foods warm.
An 110V adapter
Conclusion
The Koolatron 26-Quart Soft-Sided Electric Travel Cooler
Its large 26-quart capacity along with its multiple external pockets provides easy access to your belongings while on the move and all for a moderate price of $129.97
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[box type=”bio”]TESLARATI provides impartial reviews and is in no way paid by the vendor for the content that is produced.
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Elon Musk
The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Elon Musk says all cars will eventually need Starlink to handle massive AI bandwidth demand.
Elon Musk is making the case that satellite internet, not fiber or cellular towers, will end up wired into every car on the road. In a string of posts on X, the SpaceX CEO wrote that all cars will have Starlink in the future and called satellite connectivity the only way to get super high bandwidth to billions of vehicles.
The posts started with Musk endorsing a Cloudflare forecast that traffic generated by autonomous AI agents will soon dwarf traffic generated by humans browsing the internet, a shift he described as not a close call at all. From there he narrowed the argument to infrastructure, writing that the only system that can support the insanely fast bandwidth growth needed by AI is Starlink, before extending the logic to cars specifically.
AI agentic Internet traffic will obviously VASTLY exceed human usage. Not a close call at all.
Cloudflare’s forecast is accurate. https://t.co/VztgrinN5k pic.twitter.com/Wo4FiRKjPU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 9, 2026
The timing lines up with Tesla’s own hardware decisions. On July 20, Tesla confirmed the Cybercab would ship with a Starlink V5 terminal built into its roof, the first time the company had put satellite hardware in a production vehicle. A day later, Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, explained the connection wasn’t there for safety and that Cybercab’s driving stack runs entirely on onboard cameras and compute, while the satellite link exists for navigation, customer service, and fleet management instead. Musk followed with his own post about the feature, saying riders would be able to watch 4K streaming video during rides.
By July 22, Musk had already said Starlink would extend beyond Cybercab to Tesla’s full lineup. Sunday’s posts push that same logic outward again, this time framed as a requirement across the industry rather than a feature specific to Tesla, and tied directly to the bandwidth AI systems are expected to consume.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
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The AI argument has been building on SpaceX’s side for months. The company has an FCC filing pending for a third generation Starlink constellation, and it has separately proposed Starmind, a constellation of up to a million satellites designed to run AI computation directly in orbit rather than just relay data. Musk has said he expects space to become the cheapest place to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Starlink and Starmind serve different jobs inside that vision, one moving data and the other processing it, but Sunday’s posts treat vehicles as one more category of hardware that will eventually need both.
None of this changes anything for Tesla owners today. Cars already on the road keep running on LTE and Wi-Fi, and Tesla hasn’t outlined a retrofit path for existing vehicles. The July 22 commitment applies to future production, not the fleet already delivered. What Musk added on Sunday is the reasoning: satellite connectivity isn’t a Cybercab novelty, it’s a bet that ground based networks won’t keep up with how much data cars, robots, and AI systems are about to generate.
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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The real reason Elon Musk wants every car connected to space
Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
