Lifestyle
Fight climate change while earning up to 7.5% annually?
Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that investment opportunity in the solar energy market through 2040 will be approximately $2.8 trillion. Much of that investment will come from governments and institutions. However, one firm, Wunder Capital, is allowing individuals to take part in the solar energy revolution by supporting small and medium-sized businesses and nonprofits as they make the transition to solar energy.
The massive growth seen in the solar energy sector over the last few years has been primarily driven by project economics. Meaning that solar is now cost competitive with traditional energy sources like coal and natural gas. Solar has achieved a remarkable cost decrease of ~10% annually for the last 40 years (see chart below).
Even though the cost of solar is now competitive with other energy sources in many US states, the upfront cost for small and medium-sized businesses as well as nonprofits is still prohibitively expensive (with an average system cost of a few hundred thousand dollars). Because of this, the commercial solar sector has grown much more slowly when compared to the residential and utility-scale solar sectors (see graph below).
Wunder Capital’s mission to help fix that — by providing simple, cost-effective financing solutions to qualified borrowers across the US to help them go solar, and save money each month on their energy bills. Wunder Capital has a network of 155 solar installers and developers across 30 states who send them projects to review on a weekly basis.
To date, Wunder Capital has completed over 175+ solar financings across the US. Wunder’s 2017 Year-in-Review includes some impressive stats.
None of Wunder’s solar loan portfolios have suffered any losses or write-offs, meaning that investors’ projected returns have been met. Wunder Capital has two funds currently available for investors: the Wunder Income Fund and Wunder Capital 5.
Wunder’s newest fund, Wunder Capital 5, was launched this past October, and has raised over $12M. Wunder has achieved record project pipeline numbers in the last several months, with over $110M in commercial solar projects in October alone (chart below).
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Here’s a quote from a current Wunder investor, and his experience thus far with Wunder Capital.
I liked the market space Wunder looked to serve. Solar is but one of the many great ideas to keep literal energy flowing through the economy while leveraging established infrastructure and resources. The missing piece seemed to always be financing a long term investment in an economy built on short term results. Wunder spoke to this well and I bought in. —Wunder investor Skip Larson.
About Wunder Capital: Wunder is a financial technology company that is based out of Boulder, Colorado. Founded in 2013, Wunder won the US Department of Energy’s 2014 Sunshot Challenge, as well as COSEIA’s 2015 Summit Award. Wunder also participated in the Techstars technology accelerator program. Although Wunder’s solar funds are capitalized by individual accredited investors, the parent company and the operator of each of Wunder’s solar funds — The Wunder Company — is backed by venture capital (from the likes of Techstars Ventures, Fenway Summer, and Fintech Collective as well as others).
About the Author: Bryan Birsic is the Founder and CEO of Wunder Capital and brings extensive finance and capital raising expertise to Wunder, from private equity investing at Bain & Company to financing online commercial lending companies at Village Ventures. Notably, Bryan’s firm led early investments into commercial lending market leader OnDeck Capital. Along with his finance background, Bryan has built and led several companies that bring software approaches to new markets, most notably and recently SimpleReach, where Bryan was President and which has raised more than $15mm. Bryan attended Williams College, and moved with his family to Boulder from New York City several years ago.
This article was supported by Bryan Birsic of Wunder Capital. For more information, contact brands@teslarati.com.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
The Boring Company’s new tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units.
The Boring Company just introduced a new piece of hardware, and it runs on parts pulled straight from a Tesla showroom. Liner Truck 3, unveiled in a post from the tunneling company’s official X account, is an all electric vehicle built around Tesla Model 3 battery packs and drive units, purpose built to move concrete tunnel segments to the boring machine face without a single person underground.
Introducing Liner Truck 3 — our latest fully electric tunnel vehicle.
– Tesla Model 3 battery and drive units
– Transports 22,000+ lb of concrete segments to the boring machine
– 28 miles of range
– 12 mph max operating speed
– Remotely piloted from Global OCC in Texas, with… pic.twitter.com/XB7FgSXnpy— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) August 7, 2026
The job itself is unglamorous but critical. Each precast segment run weighs more than 22,000 pounds, roughly the load of a full cement mixer, and Liner Truck 3 hauls that weight repeatedly between the surface staging area and wherever the Prufrock machine happens to be cutting.
The Boring Company said Liner Truck 3 is piloted remotely out of its Global Operations Control Center in Texas, extending the Zero-People-In-Tunnel approach the company has spent years building toward. An earlier version of a ZPIT liner truck was already tested at the company’s Bastrop, Texas research tunnels, and a factory tour released last month showed an employee flying a fully loaded liner truck with a PlayStation controller. Liner Truck 3 looks like the production version of that same idea, cleaned up and pushed into daily use.
The timing lines up with a company digging in more places than it ever has before. The Boring Company now has multiple Prufrock machines active or arriving in Nashville, where Music City Loop construction has been accelerating since February, and its Vegas Loop network keeps adding tunnel mileage on a near monthly basis. Every one of those projects depends on getting concrete segments to the cutting face fast enough to keep the boring machine from idling, which is exactly the bottleneck Liner Truck 3 is designed to remove.
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It also reinforces something Tesla owners have watched happen gradually across Musk’s companies: passenger car hardware finding a second life in heavy equipment. Model 3 drive units already move people through the Vegas Loop, and now the same components are hauling concrete underground in Nashville and wherever The Boring Company digs next. Whether that kind of component reuse extends further into TBC’s equipment lineup, or into other Musk owned industrial hardware, is the next thing worth watching.
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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The Boring Company’s newest tunnel vehicle runs on Tesla parts and no one is driving it
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
