Lifestyle
Tesla’s entire “S3XY” Performance fleet duke it out in all-out drag battle
Tesla’s lineup of all-electric vehicles was recently put to the test with a full-family drag race of 2020 Performance-level variants of the Model S, Model 3, Model X, and Model Y. While the company’s cars are well known for their mastery of the track, a competition among siblings is perhaps one of the most fun things to watch with all the specs on display.
Thomas and James of YouTube channel Throttle House hosted the Tesla family feud, putting on their “S3XY”-est drag race to-date, albeit the quietest. The Model 3 and Model Y were previously tested by the two personalities and known to be “masters of acceleration.” For this particular race, though, they opted to drive the Model S and Model X, both matte black with XPEL STEALTH paint finishes.
Since the all-electric cars lose power as they lose their state of charge, all four Tesla owners Supercharged their respective vehicles at the same place before arriving at the track for an optimal comparison environment.
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- Tesla family drag race. | Image: Throttle House/YouTube
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- Tesla family drag race. | Image: Throttle House/YouTube
Perhaps not surprisingly, the eldest of the pack – the Model S – landed itself as the winner, but the ease at which it did so is quite amazing even when expected. Both the Performance Model S and Performance Model X had similar advantages with Ludicrous Mode, and both drivers also used “Cheetah Stance Launch Mode” to further amplify their cars’ racing capabilities partially by starting in a crouch-style position. This latest Launch Mode uses adaptive suspension along with powertrain upgrades to improve the performance of the already lightning-quick vehicles.
The first run of Tesla vehicles resulted in a win from the Model S without much say from the other three. The Model X and Model 3 battled it out a few car lengths behind the Model S, but ultimately the Model X prevailed. Bringing up the rear a few car lengths behind its more battle-tested siblings, the Model Y gave a good performance overall, especially considering that it’s aimed to be an electric family crossover. It’s additionally worth noting that its competitors were other top-tier performers whose tech has been refined by Tesla for years using available driving stats.
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- Tesla family drag race. | Image: Throttle House/YouTube
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- Tesla family drag race. | Image: Throttle House/YouTube
A second run was done by the Throttle House hosts to test the Tesla vehicles without their usual launch acceleration advantages. There, too, the Model S kept its crown, but not without a bit of a fight from the Model 3. In the end, the Model X barely got its nose ahead of the Model 3 right at the finish line (cone). The Model Y was on their tails despite lacking in the rest of the advantages afforded Tesla’s more premium cars.
Throttle House’s video did not provide the drag race times, however, a comparison of the four vehicles shows how they differ and what specs in particular likely played parts in the outcome of the family battle.
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- The Tesla Model S Performance has 684 horsepower, a 100 kWh battery pack, a top speed of 163 mph, and a 0-60 time of 2.3.
- The Tesla Model 3 Performance has 450 horsepower, a 75 kWh battery pack, a top speed of 162 mph, and a 0-60 time of 3.2 seconds.
- The Tesla Model X Performance has 762 horsepower, a 100 kWh battery pack, a top speed of 163 mph, and a 0-60 time of 2.9 seconds.
- The Tesla Model Y Performance has 450 horsepower, a 75 kWh battery pack, a top speed of 155 mph, and a 0-60 time of 3.5 seconds.
You can watch Throttle House’s full Tesla family drag race below:
Check out some of the behind the scenes footage from our friends at the Tesla Owners Online Club who helped coordinate the epic Tesla Performance drag race battle!
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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