Lifestyle
Tesla Model S Performance hailed as one of Best Modern Muscle Cars in the world
The Tesla Model S has been recognized as one of Edmunds’ “Top 10 Modern Muscle Cars of 2020,” making it the only electric vehicle to make the cut in the publication’s list of impressively fast cars.
Edmunds recognizes the Model S Performance as one of the “best modern muscle cars in the world.” While Tesla’s flagship sedan has won many awards, from “Car of the Decade” to “Best Car to Buy” over its eight-year tenure in the auto market, its recognition as a muscle car is particularly impressive.
The term “muscle car” was derived from the late 1960s and early 1970s when American vehicles with sporty designs and impressive performance backed by powerful V8 engines were all the rave. The Pontiac GTO and the Chevy Chevelle were just two of the most notable cars that were classified in the “muscle” category. These loud, fast, powerful machines were groundbreaking on their own because they introduced American car enthusiasts to the beginning of loud and quick street-legal vehicles.
The Tesla Model S Performance is one of the best modern muscle cars in the world. https://t.co/ypGYZJzirU pic.twitter.com/Exh2hjBpZB
— Edmunds (@edmunds) May 20, 2020
The automotive sector is continuously evolving and changing. In 2020, muscle cars are still a thing, and they’re sleeker, more aesthetically pleasing vehicles. However, never has a quiet, battery-powered vehicle ever been recognized as a “muscle car.” While the Model S Performance is undoubtedly one of the fastest cars in the world, something about its lack of a petrol-powered engine always kept it excluded from these lists.
Edmunds finally took a leap of faith and included the 2.3 seconds 0-60 mph, 163 mph top speed Model S Performance to its list. Fully recognizing the consequences that the publication may feel from some of the automotive industry’s most seasoned enthusiasts, a turn in automotive tides has certainly given Tesla reason to have a spot on the list.
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The Model S Performance is fast, and there is no doubt about that. Its two electric motors provide it with 684 horsepower, according to Tesla. But its additional driving options, like Ludicrous Plus Mode, give a driver the ability to pack even more of a punch with the press of a few buttons on the car’s massive centrally-located touchscreen.
Its electric motors also give the car something that no gas-powered engine will ever have: instant torque. This feature allows the Model S to consistently outperform even the most sophisticated and powerful engines in the world in the quarter-mile. With additions like Cheetah Launch Mode, which lowers the front body to allow for superior aerodynamic performance, the Model S continues to improve, leaving no doubt that it deserves a spot on the list.
With a price of $99,990, anyone who wants the Model S will undoubtedly pay a high price, but its performance specifications are well worth it. Edmunds agrees.
The full list of Edmunds’ Best Modern Muscle Cars is available here.
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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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