Lifestyle
Tesla Semi gets nod from trucking veteran: “(It’s) a good thing for the industry”
Spurred on by the disruption of first movers like Tesla, the electric vehicle revolution is spreading at an extremely rapid pace. With the arrival of vehicles like the Tesla Semi, the EV movement is set to spread to even larger markets. Amidst the Semi’s impending disruption, industry veterans are beginning to get excited about the all-electric long-hauler’s arrival.
One of these veterans is Sean Chenault, who has been in the trucking business for 16 years. Over this time, he has taken on numerous roles, from being a trucker to serving as a manager. Just recently, Chenault expressed his optimism for the Semi, stating that the vehicle “is a good thing for the trucking industry as a whole.”
Chenault further noted that the Semi’s impressive feature set, such as its Class 8 hauling capacity, its 5-second 0-60 mph acceleration time, and its capability to travel around 500 miles per charge, is only the tip of the iceberg for the electric truck’s potential. As a trucking veteran, Chenault pointed out that one of the Semi’s most compelling capabilities would be its semi-autonomous features.
“Having autonomous vehicles, you don’t need to pay a driver, and you don’t need to worry about hours of service,” he said.
When the Tesla Semi was announced, Elon Musk noted that the company’s current technology was already enough to give the electric long-hauler a semi-autonomous feature. Dubbed as “Convoy Mode,” the capability would allow multiple Semis to semi-autonomously draft in close proximity with each other, reducing energy usage from wind resistance.
“The convoy technology, the tracking technology, this is something that we are confident we can today do ten times safer than a human driver. I want to be clear, this is something we can do now,” Musk said.
Concept videos shared by Tesla during the Semi’s unveiling show one manned Semi leading two unmanned electric trucks along a route. Thus, while it might still take some time before Convoy Mode is rolled out to the company’s upcoming fleet of long-haulers, there might come a time when one driver could effectively drive three trucks — or with further software and hardware improvements — possibly even more.
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Roadmaster Group CEO John Wilbur remarked that Tesla’s technology would ultimately offer a way to move cargo while reducing the amount of manpower needed to complete tasks. Wilbur highlighted that this particular advantage actually helps address one of the trucking industry’s main challenges today.
“We are struggling to find drivers now. If autonomous drivers are means to eliminate that deficit, it’s a good thing,” he said.
The Tesla Semi is currently being tested on US roads. The silver prototype, for one, has been spotted in multiple states over the past few months. The matte black test mule, which also made an appearance during the vehicle’s unveiling, was recently spotted charging at a Supercharger as well. Elon Musk initially announced that the Semi would start production sometime in 2019, though later statements from Tesla head of investor relations Martin Viecha suggested that the company would “earnestly” start producing the Semi by 2020.
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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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