Lifestyle
Tales from a Tesla Model S with 450,000 miles: Battery life, durability, and more
The quality and durability of Tesla’s vehicles are not just talking points for fans of the all-electric car manufacturer – they’re traits that prove themselves time and again as a benefit of the ownership experience. In a recent example, a 2015 Tesla Model S that’s driven almost 450,000 miles shuttling passengers over long distances was shown to be still running strong and ready for more travel, according to a video overview posted by the founder of the company that owns it, Tesloop.
Tesloop is a connected mobility company for Tesla owners that’s currently developing an open-source mobile app called Carmiq. The company previously operated as a Tesla-only ride share service, offering trips between various cities in southern California and Las Vegas. The long distances involved in Tesloop’s operations put its Tesla fleet to incredible endurance tests, and aside from wear-and-tear seen in most vehicles with similar milage or less, the company’s experience with its 2015 Model S was very positive overall and it still drives well today.
“I think this is the only car that I can confidently say drives better today than it did three years ago and after 450,000 miles. And that’s due to the over-the-air software which has updated the car with Autopilot…The general driving feel of it is still really good…I think it would be very hard to tell this car has this many miles on it if you didn’t know,” Haynd Sonnad, founder of Tesloop, commented in the video.
Nicknamed “eHawk”, Tesloop’s Model S was built in June 2015 and has required a few repairs and major services during its lifetime. Some were paid for by Tesloop as part of its day-to-day business needs, such as tire replacement, and several others were paid for by Tesla under the car’s warranty, such as high voltage battery replacement.
A spreadsheet documenting all of the Model S’s service and maintenance experiences was published alongside its video overview for specific details. As listed, the most notable major events over the vehicle’s life time were the front drive unit replacement at 36,404 miles due to a part failure and two main battery replacements, one at 194,237 miles, the other at 324,044 miles. All three replacements were covered under the car’s 8-year, unlimited-mile warranty.
The first battery pack the Tesla Model S had experienced 1.2 miles of range lost per 10,000 miles while being driven about 17,000 miles per month and was replaced due to a battery chemistry issue. The second pack was losing about 4.7 miles every 10,000 miles driven, and its replacement was due to a defect in the battery assembly. The current battery is a 90 kWh pack and showing a loss of about 2.4 miles of range per 10,000 miles driven; however, about midway through the mileage, the car was transitioned from a long distance shuttle to a daily rental car, so the averages may not be a great reflection on its efficiency. At about 126,000 miles into the new pack, eHawk’s battery degradation is around 9%.
Also worth a mention are the brake pad and rotor replacements made for all the Model S’s wheels at 225,351 miles despite the average tire replacement taking place about every 53,000 miles from the long distances driven during regular use. The total owner cost for repairs after nearly 450,000 miles was listed as under $13,000, and general vehicle repairs came in at under $15,000.
During Tesla’s Autonomy Day investor event, CEO Elon Musk estimated that a new battery pack set to go into production next year would operate for one million miles with minimal maintenance, and the improvements are being driven by the company’s march towards its autonomous Tesla Network robo taxi service. Tesloop’s early adoption of Tesla’s vehicles may have meant the company’s most advanced technology wasn’t immediately available to take advantage of, but considering the results seen at 450,000 miles with an older variation, the quality and durability of Tesla vehicles have already proven themselves worth ownership at any stage of development.
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To see Tesloop’s full overview of its 450,000-mile, 2015 Tesla Model S’s condition, watch the video below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhbD44jXffY
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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