Lifestyle
Tesla Model S flexes its muscles against S197 Ford Mustang GT in drag race
The Model S has been Tesla’s flagship sedan for years now, and through its numerous iterations, it has become synonymous with power and quickness, particularly in straight-line races. This became even more evident when Tesla started releasing its P-branded vehicles, which are equipped with dual motors that give the electric cars an added boost in performance. Eventually, Tesla also introduced software enhancements to its P-series cars, making them even faster.
Before the arrival of the fearsome Tesla Model S P100D, the electric car that struck fear into drivers of high-performance gas-powered vehicles was the Model S P90D, a sedan equipped with a 90 kWh battery pack. Without Tesla’s Ludicrous upgrade, the Model S P90D was already capable of sprinting from 0-60 mph in just 2.8 seconds. With the addition of Ludicrous Mode through a software update, the Model S P90 became the first Tesla to hit 60 mph in 2.6 seconds. So daunting was the Model S P90D’s ferocity in the quarter-mile that it eventually became known as a “Ferrari Killer,” on account of the number of supercars it managed to beat in straight-line races.
Tesla no longer makes the Model S P90D, as the company’s flagship sedan is now the Model S P100D, which is equipped with an even bigger battery pack and even more insane acceleration. That being said, there are still a lot of Model S P90D driving around in America’s roads. One of these is a crimson, pre-facelift P90D that frequents the New England Dragway in Epping, New Hampshire. Just as it was during the pre-P100D days, the Model S P90D could be seen battling against some gasoline-powered high-performance cars on the drag strip.
One of these recent bouts was uploaded by YouTube’s Drag Racing and Car Stuff channel, which shares videos of races the that are held at the track. In one such run, the pre-facelift Model S P90D could be seen battling an S197 Ford Mustang GT that is modified to pass the quarter-mile-mark in 12 seconds. In a way, the battle between the two vehicles seemed to be a match between two American muscle cars — one gasoline-powered, one all-electric — both designed and developed in the United States.
The S197 Ford Mustang GT is the 5th generation of the iconic muscle car. Design to pay homage to the design and theme of the Mustangs of old, the S197 pretty much became the vehicle that resurrected the beloved pony car. Under the hood, the S197 Ford Mustang GT was equipped with an all-aluminum 4.6 L 3-valve SOHC Modular V8 engine with variable camshaft timing and a rugged Tremec TR-3650 transmission system. The Mustang GT’s engine produces 300 hp (224 kW) at 5750 rpm and 320 lb·ft (433 N·m) of at 4500 rpm, allowing the vehicle to roar from 0-60 mph in 5.6 seconds and boast a quarter-mile time of 13.8 seconds.
Just like the Mustangs of old, knowledgeable mechanics could easily improve the performance of the pony car, making it even faster. The S197 Ford Mustang GT that went against the Model S P90D at the New England Dragway was one of these, as the muscle car was tuned to hit the quarter-mile in just ~12 seconds.
That being said, when faced with the raw power and insane acceleration of a Tesla Model S P90D, the S197 Ford Mustang GT was ultimately forced to bow to the all-American, electric-powered “muscle car.” The Model S P90D’s instant torque immediately made a difference, allowing it to establish an early lead against the S197 GT, and it just continued pulling from there. The Mustang GT pulled a valiant effort, finishing the quarter-mile run in 12.96 seconds at 111.17 mph. Unfortunately, it was still outclassed by the Model S P90D, which ran the quarter mile in 11.29 seconds at 117.37 mph.
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Tesla’s newest Performance-branded vehicle, the Model 3 Performance, is also starting to develop a reputation on the drag strip. Over the past weeks, the electric sedan has already competed against several vehicles, including a McLaren 570S, a Dodge Challenger R/T, an Infiniti G35 coupe, and even a Chevrolet Corvette C7 in the quarter-mile. Just like its larger siblings, the Model 3 Performance is proving to be quite a competitor in straight line races.
Watch the Model S P90D flex its muscles in a drag race against the S197 Ford Mustang GT in the video below.
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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