Tesla Model Y
The Tesla Model Y is perfectly timed for Europe’s crossover market growth
The Model Y may be Tesla’s most disruptive vehicle yet, and this will likely be evident in Europe, where crossover sales are expected to increase in the coming years. Tesla’s Giga Berlin is estimated to go online in July 2021 and it will start with the production of the Model Y. Looking at the target timeframes for the facility, Elon Musk’s electric car company seems to have timed the rollout of the crossover perfectly to make most of its potential the region.
The Silicon Valley-based carmaker continues its progress in Grunheide. Just this week, the state government announced that there’s enough water for the upcoming car factory and reassured local residents, businesses, and concerned environmental groups that Tesla will not compromise their water supply. The state parliament is also waiting for the second appraisal of the industrial property where Giga Berlin will be built. Once that review is done, the purchase is expected to be completed and that’s practically a green light for full construction activities to begin.
While Tesla will get busy this year in building Giga Berlin from the ground up, LMC Automotive believes the sales of compact SUVs in the region will be flat. The automotive forecasting firm predicts that sales in the segment will just hit the 2 million mark as car manufacturers transition from older vehicles to EVs. Just as Giga Berlin turns its gears to mass-produce the Model Y, LMC expects an uptick in crossover sales to 2.1 million units per year, rising to about 2.8 million by the mid-2020s.
In the first 11 months of 2019, JATO Dynamics plotted an increase in compact SUV sales in several European countries such as Germany (12%), the UK (6.2%), France (4.3%), Italy (1.7 percent), and Spain (5.2%), but this trend might be disrupted this year as carmakers introduce new vehicles designed to meet tougher European emissions requirements.
The effectivity of the tough emission regulations started Jan. 1 this year. New vehicles are expected to spew out lesser carbon dioxide or to be more precise, about 95 grams of CO2 on average per kilometer by 2021. If automotive manufacturers fail to meet this standard, they can expect hefty fines that overall may reach billions of dollars. Europe’s car industry may not be fully prepared for this. Even German car giants such as Volkswagen are struggling to keep up.
The star of the show will be green vehicles, particularly all-electric cars. Tesla does not have the weight of fuel-guzzling vehicles in its fleet, and it also has the Model 3 that drove the EV market growth in Europe by becoming the third best-selling model last December 2019. With the Model Y estimated to start rolling out from Giga Berlin by 2021, Tesla will be able to meet the predicted demand for compact SUVs, which, according to estimates, will be higher then. This could result in the all-electric crossover seeing a lot of success in the European market.
Between now and when the Germany-made Model Y hits the market, Tesla would be in a good position to make use of “advanced manufacturing technologies” and “battery technologies that can blow people’s minds.” Such factors may increase production, lower the cost of vehicles, and increase profit margins. All these three can be utilized for Tesla’s Model Y push.
In a way, Germany is already laying a path for the arrival of compelling all-electric crossover SUVs. The German government is encouraging consumers to buy electric cars using purchase grants and ownership tax exemption for 10 years. The country also halved its company car taxes, and has introduced perks such as free parking and the use of bus lanes, among others.
All Tesla has to do is make sure it produces enough units of the Model Y to meet the demand in the region. Unlike its competitors, Tesla makes pure EVs, so the CO2 emission of its fleet will meet regulations. It’s years ahead in terms of battery technologies that are practically the lifeblood of the EV industry as well. Before competitors catch up, Tesla would be in another position that will make legacy carmakers scratch their heads.
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Fortunately for Tesla, the Model Y is the product of years’ worth of innovations in vehicle production, including the painful growing pains that the electric car maker experienced with the Model 3. Details about the Model Y’s production process are few for now, though speculations are abounding that the crossover will adopt a number of design elements that will make it simple and cost-effective to produce. This matters a lot, since the Model Y will be priced higher than the Model 3 sedan, giving Tesla more profits .
The Model Y does not just complete the S3XY vehicles of Tesla but it will be a juggernaut, that like the Model 3, will disrupt the automotive industry. As Germany’s and the rest of Europe’s air get cleaner and cleaner in the near future, Tesla’s coffers will likely be filled with some healthy profits.
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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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.
News
Tesla’s AI Chief just hinted at something big for FSD v14 lite owners
Tesla’s AI chief suggests the newest FSD v14 Lite build may finally go wide release.
Tesla’s head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, noted on Sunday that the newest FSD v14 Lite build rolling out to Hardware 3 cars is likely the version that goes to wide release, the strongest signal yet that Tesla is near to closing out an early access phase that Hardware 3 owners have waited more than a year for.
Elluswamy made the comment in response to an extensive review from Tesla owner Zack, known on X as @BLKMDL3, who tested software version 2026.20.6.10 and detailed the changes in a lengthy post. “FSD v14 Lite (for Tesla AI3 hardware vehicles) review.
The update restarts a rollout that had stalled after its initial release. Tesla began pushing FSD v14 Lite to Hardware 3 early access drivers on June 29, bringing driving behavior learned on the newer Hardware 4 computer down to the more limited chip that has powered Tesla vehicles built between 2019 and early 2023. That release, as we covered in detail, gave roughly 4 million HW3 vehicles their first meaningful update since being frozen on version 12.6 in early 2025.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ Release Notes: new capabilities and features
The latest build adds features that bring Hardware 3 closer in line with what Hardware 4 owners already have. FSD can now start directly from park without a brake pedal confirmation, a change Zack called a small but meaningful quality of life improvement. The interface also picks up the blue “P” park icon, approaching destination alerts, and a dedicated Self-Driving app with streak tracking, all details previously exclusive to the AI4 branch of v14, as outlined in Tesla’s original release notes.
The stakes around Hardware 3 go beyond software polish. Tesla sold the Full Self-Driving package for years on the promise that every vehicle equipped with it had the hardware needed to eventually drive itself without supervision. That promise broke down during Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call, when Musk acknowledged HW3 cars could not run unsupervised FSD, prompting Tesla to offer trade-in discounts and hardware retrofits alongside the Lite software track.
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
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Tesla has continued to frame v14 Lite as the primary path forward for the HW3 fleet, telling owners in April that international markets would follow the U.S. rollout once regulatory approvals came through. For now, HW3 owners in the early access group are the only ones running the new build. A broader rollout would mark the second major software delivery to the legacy fleet since Tesla first released FSD v14 to Hardware 4 vehicles, and the first sign since June that the Lite program is still moving rather than stuck in early access limbo.
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