Lifestyle
Why does a Tesla have such high resale value?
If you buy an electric car that isn’t a Tesla, chances are you will take an enormous hit when it comes time to trade it in. According to Black Book, a 2013 Nissan LEAF is worth just 22% of its original MSRP. A five year old LEAF is worth a dismal 11% of what it cost new. A three year old conventional car is typically worth between 45% and 65% of its original cost.
Keep in mind that all calculations involving electric cars are skewed by the federal tax credit. What buyers paid for their car is often considerably less than MSRP after the credit is figured in. But even with that caveat, that used LEAF is typically worth about 30% of what a buyer paid for it three years ago.
“To be under 20 percent is fairly telling,” said Anil Goyal, Black Book’s senior vice-president of operations. “A lot of it has to do with demand.” Demand for used electric cars is suppressed by a number of factors. First is range. An early Nissan LEAF can only drive about 60 miles before range anxiety kicks in. The same is true of most other electric “compliance cars” like the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Volkswagen e-Golf and Fiat 500e.
Another factor is the pace of improvements. When the personal computer first hit the market, upgrades happened so rapidly that the machine you bought in the morning was often obsolete by the time you got it home. Battery range has increased significantly in recent years. Black Book’s Goyal says used car buyers are just not that interested in a car that has less than 100 miles of range. The BMW i3 is included in that group.
A three year old Tesla Model S is worth 62% of its original value
Another factor is the chaotic nature of EV charging networks. Competing standards, lack of consumer information, and a welter of confusing charging plans cause anxiety for EV drivers. Which brings us to Tesla. A three year old Tesla Model S is worth 62% of its original value according to Black Book.
Why? Several factors. First, over the air updates eliminate most of the fear that the car will be out of date in a year or two. Second, the Supercharger network assures Tesla owners that when they need to replenish their batteries while away from home, a free fast charging facility is nearby.
Tesla continues to aggressively expand its fast-charging Supercharger network across the world
A third factor is styling. Most manufacturers decided to give their first electric cars “Hey, look at me!” lines. But mainstream buyers want mainstream styling. The Tesla looks Model S and Model X look like the premium luxury cars they are. The forthcoming Model 3 has a pleasing, modern design that will make it stand out from other sedans without the weirdness of the BMW i3. Chevrolet tried making the original Volt look different, but decided to make the second generation more conventional in appearance. It’s hard to tell a new Volt from a new Chevy Cruze.
A number of car companies are planning to offer battery electric vehicles in the next 3 to 5 years. How will they fare in the used car market after the new wears off and they have tens of thousands of miles on them? That’s purely speculative at this point, but unless they have the build quality and reliability people expect, over the air updates to keep then current with technological changes, and the comprehensive charging networks needed to eliminate any hint of range anxiety, they are unlikely to retain their original value as well as a Tesla.
While everyone else is whining about how hard it is to sell electric cars and hedging their bets by building cars that can be powered by gasoline, diesel, plug-in powertrains, batteries, fuel cells, and pixie dust, Tesla is just going out and doing what needs to be done to make the electric car revolution a reality.
The numbers don’t lie. When it comes to selling electric cars that people want and that continue to hold their value as the years and miles go by, only one company done it successfully — Tesla. Everyone else is so far behind that by the time they catch up to where Tesla is today, Elon will be sending the first astronauts on their way to Mars.
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.
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
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.
Elon Musk
Tesla Diner is throwing a birthday party with a Franz-signed special treat
Tesla Diner turns one on July 21 with Optimus, roller skates, and a Franz-signed hat.
Tesla is throwing its Hollywood Diner a first birthday party on July 21 and the celebration comes with a guest list of unique items, including a limited run of Tesla Diner birthday hats personally signed by Tesla Chief Designer Franz von Holzhausen for the first 50 customers who place an in-car order at midnight.
One year after lines wrapped around the block on Santa Monica Boulevard for a diner that most of the restaurant industry did not take seriously, Tesla is making the case that the concept was worth the years it took to build. The concept had been in Musk’s head since at least 2018, when he floated the idea of “an old school drive-in, roller skates and rock restaurant” on X, describing it years later as “‘Grease’ meets ‘The Jetsons’ with Supercharging.”
Tesla Optimus Gen 3 is coming to the Tesla Diner with new ambitions
What made the diner genuinely different from any restaurant that came before it was not the menu or the nostalgia. It was the ordering model. Tesla owners could place food orders directly from their vehicle’s touchscreen before arriving, a small feature that hints at something much larger on the horizon. As the Cybercab and unsupervised FSD expand across major cities, the diner model becomes a template for an entirely new kind of commerce. A robotaxi pulling in to charge does not need a human to walk up to a counter. The vehicle places the order, the food is ready on arrival, and the passenger never interrupts the experience of being driven somewhere else. It is the first glimpse of what drive-through commerce looks like when the car is doing the driving.
As Teslarati has reported, Musk signaled immediately after opening that the Hollywood location was only the beginning, posting that Tesla would expand the concept to major cities worldwide and along Supercharger corridors on long-distance routes if the first location proved successful. One year in, the birthday celebration on July 21 makes a strong case that it has. Tesla announced a full day of events including a Cybercab on display, a birthday menu, Optimus in attendance, face painting, a photo booth, roller skating servers, a light show, a Skypad DJ, and complimentary collectibles.
If Musk’s ambition holds, the Hollywood diner is year one of something much bigger. The birthday party is the proof of concept. The robotaxi fleet is the business model waiting behind it.
Tesla Diner is turning 1 on July 21st, so we’re throwing a party
Come swing by for a day full of fun:
– Cybercab on display
– Birthday menu
– @Tesla_Optimus
– Face painting for kids & adults
– Photo booth
– Servers on roller skates delivering your order
– Light show
– Skypad DJ… pic.twitter.com/TD8pOjihYs— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) July 18, 2026
SpaceX wants to catch Starship for launch 14, Elon Musk says
Tesla to open source Model S and Model X designs and software
