Lifestyle
Tesla Model S P100D drops in on Volkswagen event to casually destroy competition on the drag strip
A panda-painted Tesla Model S P100D recently made an appearance at a Volkswagen festival in the UK, battling two high-performance vehicles in the quarter mile. The Volkswagen event, dubbed Bug Jam 32, was held at the Santa Pod Raceway in Podington, Bedfordshire, England, a location popular for 1/8-mile and 1/4-mile drag races. In a video shared on YouTube by auto enthusiast channel VeeDubRacing, the electric family sedan could be seen casually crushing its German-made competitors without breaking a sweat.
The Model S P100D competed against two opponents — a Volkswagen Golf R and what appears to be a tuned Volkswagen Corrado. The matchup between the two ICE-powered vehicles and the Model S was almost humorous, since the all-electric car looked completely out of place in the event, which was populated by smoking Volkswagens from both past and present.
The first Volkswagen that went up against the Model S P100D was a Golf R hatchback, a lightweight, high-performance car. The Golf R is one of Volkswagen’s most popular vehicles, having won multiple awards such as the 2015 North American Car of the Year, 2015 Motor Trend Car of the Year, 2013 European Car of the Year, and the 2013 World Car of the Year. Just like popular Japanese-bred tuner cars like the Nissan GT-R, the Volkswagen Golf R could be modified into a race monster under expert hands. Popular auto publication Jalopnik, for one, once featured a heavily-tuned Golf R with an insane engine output of 470 hp from its 2.0-liter turbocharged FSI Inline-four engine. According to the publication, the tuned, 470-hp Golf R was powerful enough to surprise even the most capable of drivers.
Another Volkswagen that engaged the Model S P100D on the quarter-mile appeared to be a tuned VW Corrado. The Corrado was in production from 1988-1995, and is one of the German carmaker’s most memorable drivers’ cars to date. The 3-door, front-wheel-drive vehicle was quite advanced when it was released, including features such as an active rear spoiler that raises automatically when the car exceeds 50 mph. The Corrado VR6, the brand’s top-tier variant, is noted for its rather sizable 2.9-liter, 12-valve VR6 engine, which occupied roughly the same space as a conventional 4-cylinder engine. Just like the Golf R, the Corrado was critically acclaimed, with Auto Express describing it as “one of Volkswagen’s best-ever drivers’ cars.” British publication Car magazine also gave the Corrado VR6 a spot in its list of “25 Cars You Must Drive Before You Die.”
Racing pedigree and history aside, the Golf R and the Corrado were up against an all-electric drag racing beast capable of humiliating actual supercars on the strip. The Tesla Model S P100D finished its run against the Golf R in 11.43 seconds while traveling at a speed of 116.71 mph, beating the Volkswagen’s 13.91 seconds and 103.30 mph. The P100D’s run against the Corrado ended in similar fashion, with the family sedan finishing the quarter-mile in 11.40 seconds, more than two seconds faster than the Volkswagen’s 13.88 seconds.
While the Model S P100D and Model X P100D have already established themselves as electric legends on the drag strip with their capability to outrun supercars in the quarter-mile, Tesla’s latest high-performance vehicle — the Model 3 Performance — seems set to make waves on the track. Based on initial reviews of the vehicle, the Model 3 Performance, particularly when its Track Mode feature is enabled, is a car that can very well shake the high-performance sedan echelons in the auto industry.
Watch the Model S P100D take on the Volkswagen duo in the video below.
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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.
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![Tesla Optimus Gen 3 [Credit: Tesla]](https://www.teslarati.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/tesla-optimus-gen3-diner-80x80.jpg)
