Lifestyle
Tesla club performs group ‘Smart Summon’ to simulate an autonomous valet service of the future
A gathering of Tesla Model 3, Model S, and Model X owners from the official Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley Club got together over the weekend for a Cars and Coffee event to foster camaraderie in the community. But the biggest highlight of the day, outside of a Frunk N Swap activity wherein club members exchanged popular accessories and personal items from their vehicle’s front trunk, was a group Smart Summon activity that simulated an autonomous valet service of the future.
Roughly 80 Tesla owners and enthusiasts met up at the Cherry Avenue Supercharger in San Jose, CA on Sunday to share personal stories of electric vehicle ownership and to build friendships with local Tesla owners.
Club member Arash Malek, who goes by the handle @minimalduck on Twitter, gathered fellow members and came up with the idea of a ‘group Smart Summon’ with their Model 3s as a showcase of how Tesla’s latest autonomous vehicle retrieval feature works in a real-world scenario.
“The Smart Summon went very well and the cars did not stop as much as some had anticipated. The technology feels like it has come a long way since its initial release. Afterward, a lot more members felt encouraged and better about the technology,” Tesla Owners Club of Silicon Valley founder and president John Stringer tells Teslarati.
Got @tesla’s for days. So much demand in one spot. Love this community. Thankful to @elonmusk @tesla for creating this. pic.twitter.com/gyPwPzEB0r
— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) January 26, 2020
“To be able to summon your car to yourself is one step closer to autonomous driving. At some point, your car will be able to come to you no matter where you are and no matter what floor you are on. It will be a normal thing to see a car without someone in it,” added Stringer.
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Smart Summon is available to customers who purchased Full Self-Driving Capability or Enhanced Autopilot. With this feature, one can enable their Teslas to go to them or to a destination of choice from a parking spot that’s within their line of sight. It is a pretty handy and convenient feature for those who might be coming out of grocery stores, those dealing with a fussy child, or for those who opt not to walk to the parking lot for whatever reason.
In the future, what members of the Tesla Owners Club of Silicon Valley did over the weekend can be applied to autonomous valet services at hotels, airports, or other venues where such technology can be used. It is an initial step to how Tesla’s future Robotaxi service would operate in the future. Passenger can be given temporary access codes to Summon a vehicle to pick them up for a ride or perhaps valet services will have a dispatch system to deliver rides to waiting customers.
Tesla owners can only expect the Elon Musk-led electric carmaker to further improve the Smart Summon feature overtime. A Tesla Model 3 owner subjected their vehicle to an obstacle course and saw results that made them believe that Tesla is on its way to perfecting the technology for self-driving cars. With the confidence that it can also perform well outside the United States where road markings and signs may be different, Tesla expanded its release of Smart Summon to other markets including China.
Check out the drone video from @MinimalDuck, capturing fellow Tesla Owners of Silicon Valley club members Smart Summoning their Model 3s together.
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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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