Lifestyle
UPDATED Tesla’s Santa Monica Supercharger opens, Musk revises plans for diner and drive-in
Update: Ryan Zohoury clarified that Musk meant Dogecoin will be accepted at the Hollywood Supercharger as a payment option for food, drinks, and merchandise. Headline has been updated for accuracy. Paragraph 3 has been revised and moved to paragraph 4.
Tesla’s new Supercharger in Santa Monica, California located on Santa Monica Boulevard opened yesterday. The Supercharger Station is incomplete, for now. Tesla still has another address to develop for this project, and Musk confirmed it will be void of the 50’s diner or drive-in movie theater that was once planned for the site. This will instead be added to a different Supercharger facility, now planned for Hollywood.
Located 1421-1425 Santa Monica Boulevard, the new Supercharger is located on one of two lots Tesla purchased for the project. The other is located at 1401 Santa Monica Boulevard. 1421-1425 is technically the supplemental lot for the project and will house 26 total Superchargers when it is completed. A photograph of the new lot taken by Model Y owner and Los Angeles resident Ryan Zohoury shows the lot, which is turning out very similar to the blueprints submitted by Tesla to the Santa Monica City Council last year.
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- Credit: Ryan Zohoury | Twitter
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- The plans for the 36 Stall Supercharger lot at 1401 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. (Santa Monica Planning Commission)
50’s Diner and Drive-in Movies moving to Hollywood
At 1401 Santa Monica Boulevard lies the main lot of the Santa Monica Supercharger. 36 V3 Superchargers will fill this lot, and previously Tesla planned to build a Drive-in movie theater and a ’50s themed diner. Tesla added some “Easter Eggs” in this lot, even adding specially-sized parking spaces. With a majority of the spaces being a standard 9-foot width, some are as wide as 12 feet, which could hint toward the introduction of more Cybertruck-focused parking spaces as new Supercharging lots are built.
Elon Musk confirms major Tesla Santa Monica Supercharger: 50’s-style diner, drive-in movie clips
This lot will accept Dogecoin as a payment for the food and drink offerings that Tesla will have available at the Hollywood Supercharger.
Renders of the Santa Monica Supercharger found by Teslarati last year did not show any diners or large projection screens that would indicate Tesla is planning to build either of these facilities on-site. Musk basically confirmed last night that the lot at 1401 will not have these features. They will instead be added to a Supercharging facility in Hollywood.
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And futuristic diner / drive-in theater planned for Hollywood area!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 19, 2022
This is not much of a surprise. Blueprints and renderings showed relatively no room for either of these projects. However, a full-service restroom will be available on this lot. Tesla will renovate an already-built structure to accommodate these features.
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- The plans for the 36 Stall Supercharger lot at 1401 Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. (Santa Monica Planning Commission)
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- Tesla’s full-service bathroom accomodations for 1401 Santa Monica Blvd. (Credit: GPD Group)
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- What 1401 Santa Monica Blvd. will look like after Tesla finishes the Santa Monica Supercharger project. (Credit: GPD Group)
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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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