Lifestyle
Tesla Model S P100DL Electric GT race car track-tested by Top Gear veteran
British racing driver and former Top Gear and Fifth Gear television presenter Tiff Needell recently got behind the wheel of the Electric GT’s Tesla Model S P100DL race car. In a video uploaded on YouTube’s LoveCars channel, the former race driver provided several compelling insights about the vehicle, including its handling, its speed, as well as its areas for improvement.
The Electric GT, officially called the Electric Production Car Series, is a zero-emission racing series featuring modified Tesla Model S P100D vehicles. The Electric GT’s inaugural season is scheduled to begin at Jerez on November 4, 2018, ending on October 13, 2019 at Algarve. Ten races are planned for the upcoming racing season.
Tiff’s test drive of the Electric GT’s P100DL race car was held at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, a track famed for hosting the Spanish Grand Prix and the MotoGP. The track, which is 2.892 miles long, features 16 turns including an iconic straight stretch where vehicles can achieve top speed. According to the veteran race driver, the Model S P100D featured impeccable handling and aerodynamics that simply allowed the vehicle to stick to the road despite him performing aggressive driving maneuvers.
As noted by auto journalist Bozi Tatarevic on Twitter, several scenes of Tiff’s Electric GT test drive video revealed interesting details about the modified electric car. Apart from stripping the car of its interior and fitting a widebody kit made of flax fiber composite to reduce the vehicle’s weight by 1100 pounds, several aspects of the race-ready Electric GT Model S P100D stood out. As noted by Tatarevic, the Tesla race car’s door handles are permanently out, which likely helped save weight on the vehicle. An error displayed on the driver’s console pertaining to the electric car’s Air Suspension also suggests that the vehicle is equipped with an aftermarket coilover setup.
The Model S P100D’s performance brakes were further replaced with larger Alcon brakes. As noted by Tatarevic in his observations on Twitter, the rotor hat on the Electric GT race car’s brakes combines a wheel spacer. The hood of the vehicle is canted as well, likely to aid the electric car’s cooling systems. Brief shots of the vehicle under the hood seemingly reveal that Electric GT might have also modified or replaced the brake master cylinder for the vehicle. Inside the cockpit, a racing ECU could be seen installed beside the P100D race car’s media control unit.
As impressive as the Electric GT Model S P100D was on the track, however, Tiff Needell ultimately noted that the vehicle’s battery still showed some heating issues, as revealed by the Model S’ systems throttling performance after 1.5 hot laps around the Barcelona track and fans being directed towards the vehicle’s battery pack after run. The veteran racing driver stated, however, that if Electric GT can find a workaround with the Model S’ battery heating issues, the racing series could very well be successful.
While the Electric GT has chosen the Model S P100D as its vehicle of choice for its inaugural season later this year, another Tesla vehicle is steadily gaining reputation on the track. Just recently, a non-Performance Long Range Model RWD Model 3 with aftermarket suspension and brakes won the Canadian Sport Compact Series Time Attack series, defeating a Porsche Boxer and a Mazda RX-8 to claim the title. During the entire event, Sasha Anis, the driver of the vehicle, noted that the Model 3 did not experience any heating problems at all. The Model 3 Performance, which Elon Musk stated would be 15% faster than a BMW M3 around the track, is expected to perform even better during spirited driving.
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Watch Tiff Needell’s test drive of the Electric GT Model S P100DL in the video below.
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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Inside Tesla’s secretive $10 Billion “Project Crystal Sun” filing
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
