Lifestyle
Tesla’s coveted brand and supercharged role within the auto industry
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) released a comprehensive report on electric vehicles. The ILSR’s report, Choosing the Electric Avenue – Unlocking Savings, Emissions Reductions, and Community Benefits of Electric Vehicles, authored by John Farrell, is a treasure trove for those looking to learn more about the state of electric vehicles today and their exciting future ahead. The report points out “Tesla’s supercharged role” in the EV space and highlights its happy customers, better batteries, and Uber-like opportunities.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk has carved out a coveted brand within the automotive industry. “Tesla has proved to have its own sex appeal, beyond eco-consciousness… A Jefferies analyst surveyed 145 Tesla owners in June 2015, when the least-expensive Tesla model available had a $58,000 sticker price and most of Tesla’s vehicles cost substantially more. About 70% of respondents said they switched to Tesla from cars that cost less than $60,000. Overall, they were willing to pay an average of 60% more than their previous car to own a Tesla.”
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Above: Tesla dominates customer satisfaction ratings for both the EV/Hybrid and large luxury car segments (Source: ILSR)
As evidenced above, Tesla also has sky-high customer satisfaction scores. Furthermore, the Tesla brand, as a whole, “ranks first in customer satisfaction surveys, with 91% of owners saying they would buy the same car if they were repeating their shopping process, 7 percentage points more than the next car company, Porsche.”
Tesla’s reputation is also stellar in the evolving electric vehicle battery space. “As the sole electric-only car company, Tesla leads electric car manufacturing and is in hot pursuit of less expensive batteries for its models. Based on research conducted at its first-of-its-kind Gigafactory, Tesla aims to maximize efficiency in battery production to shave down costs. From 2008 to 2015, Tesla halved the cost of its battery packs despite expanding energy capacity by roughly 60 percent in the same span.”
Aside from falling battery prices at Tesla’s Gigafactory, the company’s plans to move into the self-driving, ride-sharing space should decrease costs further to the end-consumer. “Writing in Greentech Media, Tam Hunt tabulated the possible payoff for the owners of automated Teslas, based on the $15 average hourly income for a part-time Uber driver in Santa Barbara, CA. If a Tesla owner rented their vehicle on the Tesla Network at that hourly rate for 15 hours per week, they would see $225 in weekly income, or about $964 per month.”
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Above: Greentech Media’s Tab Hunt looks at how “Auto-Uber” functionality might soon pay for your Tesla (Source: ILSR)
Taking this to the extreme — your Tesla could eventually be free. “Even subtracting $80 per month in electricity and insurance costs, plus 35% in taxes, the monthly takeaway is $504. That narrowly outstrips monthly loan payments for a Tesla Model 3 priced at $27,500 (after a $7,500 federal tax credit), with $1,000 down and a five-year loan with a 5% interest rate. Under those circumstances, Hunt estimates the ‘cost’ of ownership is a net positive $4 per month. Following Hunt’s logic, and assuming regulators sign off on both the introduction of automated vehicles and Tesla’s rideshare plan, a driver with good enough credit to access favorable financing could essentially own their Tesla for free (minus a $1,000 down payment).”
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Note: Article originally published on evannex.com, by Matt Pressman
Source: ILSR
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
Lifestyle
NTSB findings on fatal Tesla crash tell a very different story
The NTSB confirmed the driver, not Tesla’s FSD, caused the fatal Texas house crash.
The National Transportation Safety Board released preliminary findings Wednesday confirming that a Tesla driver, not the vehicle’s software, caused a fatal crash in Katy, Texas in June. The driver, 44-year-old Michael Butler, had engaged Full Self-Driving Supervised mode on Rose Hollow Lane, a residential street with a 30 mph speed limit, before manually overriding the system by pressing the accelerator pedal all the way to 100%. Data recovered from the 2025 Tesla Model 3 showed the vehicle was traveling over 70 miles per hour when it struck a home and killed 76-year-old Martha Avila, who was inside. Weather was clear, the road was dry, and it was daylight.
Texas man charged in fatal Tesla crash where he blamed Autopilot
Butler told authorities he had passed out at the wheel. But security camera footage obtained by the NTSB told a different story, and showed the car accelerating through an intersection before leaving the road entirely. Police also found that Butler’s phone had Google searches including the terms “Tesla FSD not aggressive enough 2026” and “Tesla FSD too timid,” raising serious questions about how he was using the system before the crash. Butler has since been charged with manslaughter. The victim’s family has filed a lawsuit against both Butler and Tesla, alleging negligence.
The NTSB findings aligned directly with what Tesla VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy had already stated publicly on X in the weeks after the crash, writing that “the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100%.” The data confirmed his account.
Yup. In this case, the driver manually overrode self-driving by pressing the accelerator all the way to 100% of the accel pedal in this residential area. They reached a speed of 73 mph during the crash, and had the accelerator pressed even after the crash.
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) June 22, 2026
Tesla Semi finally has an FSD timeline and it’s waiting on the Cybercab
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
