Lifestyle
What Tesla Slacker Internet Radio Means to Me
In this great write up, Rob M. explains the inclusion of Slacker Radio in the Tesla’s entertainment system. Like him, I was unfamiliar with Slacker before ordering the car, and assumed it would be like other internet radio services. I was right, only, I hadn’t yet realized how profound of an inclusion this was for me.
My 60-year-old parents in law, both of whom were formerly allergic to computers, listen to Pandora on the iPad I forced upon them as a Christmas gift. My 50-year-old mother loves YouTube for its ability to display full music videos from hair bands like Guns N’ Roses. Nearly every party I attend has a soundtrack courtesy of internet radio. By now, it’s safe to say most Americans have used or heard of streaming music.
What they may not think about is how wonderful of an application it is for inside a vehicle. Every Tesla Model S comes with Slacker personal radio standard and at no additional cost. With it, you can select a song, artist or album and the radio will play the specified song as well as related songs. It also provides pre-selected channels such as 80’s hits or 90’s hip hop.
Selection can be done by way of the intuitive touch screen or by pressing a steering wheel button and commanding the car to “Play: Fool In The Rain.” Assuming you did so because that’s the kind of mood you were in, you’d be delighted to next hear songs like Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” (So *this* is where that one lyric my mother used to repeat often was from!)
Me, I’m more a “Play: Sussudio” or “Play: Missy Elliot” kind of gal. But just like this Apple Radio commercial, “It knows your mood, it knows your taste. It’s like you have a boyfriend that makes you a mix tape in your laptop.” Except, it’s your car. And where better to have a mood matching musical experience than a car?
One of my favorite uses of Slacker is when a random song comes to mind and you can listen in an instant. You may not have that song in your own digital collection. And you certainly can’t just command an obscure song to happen to be playing on FM radio. What’s even better is when that obscure song turns out to be a really good base for the radio to select other songs you didn’t even realize you wanted to listen to. I’m talking to you, Beenie Man!
And of course, as you may find to be the case when taking a spirited solo drive, sometimes you just want to hear whatever exact song it is that you consider to be your driving theme song.
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Relationships with cars are complicated. We tend to love or hate them; enjoy or dread getting behind the wheel, depending on the situation. We love road trips, family vacations and nights out with friends. But the same car that might bring joy in those situations is the one whose steering wheel you grip or bang on when yet again, your commute is ruined by one minor accident. Insert internet radio into any of those situations and as you can imagine, your mood can be instantly elevated. Go ahead, take a moment and picture a family vacation. What song do you want to hear? Now picture date night with your significant other. You’re on your way to a great dinner and want to say something. “Play: Wonderful Tonight.” How about that annual golf scramble that Bob from Accounting always wins? “Play: Eye of the Tiger.” Need to get out of your own head after a bad day at work? “Play: Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”
The Tesla is already a joy to drive for reasons stated a million times over. But music? Music speaks to the soul. And sometimes, my soul wants to escape a traffic jam by thinking of my late father.
“Play: Surrender.”
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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