Elon Musk pushes Tesla to have more in-car gaming in preparation for self-driving future

CEO Elon Musk is pushing Tesla to have more in-car games and entertainment, which he sees as ‘critical’ in a self-driving future.

Is he getting ahead of himself?

Last weekend, Tesla started pushing a new software update that Musk had been hyping as ‘fire’ over the last few weeks.

The update ended up consisting of a few user interface changes and the main new features were 3 new in-car video games and a new ‘Boombox’ feature to play custom sounds through external speakers.

Musk followed up the update with several comments regarding in-car video games and entertainment, which he sees as “critical” when achieving autonomous driving:

He said yesterday:

“Entertainment will be critical when cars drive themselves.”

The CEO announced that Tesla would be bringing an online multiplayer version of one of the games that they released in the recent update and asked his followers what Tesla should do with in-car gaming once achieving autonomous driving:

Currently, Tesla’s in-car video games are only playable when the vehicles are parked.

Musk received many suggestions, including supporting cloud gaming platforms, like Stadia, but he also got roasted for focusing on this when autonomous driving is not solved.

Tesla is currently missing Musk’s famous prediction to have “1 million robotaxis by the end of 2020.”

The automaker’s interest in video games also go beyond Musk’s tweets.

As we previously reported, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle and they recently started building a similar team in Austin.

Electrek’s Take

Is he getting ahead of himself? Yes, I think he is. This feels like a distraction from the fact that Tesla is missing another important FSD timeline put forward by Elon.

Right now, the focus should really be on solving autonomous driving and not finding what to do when they achieve that.

No one is doubting Tesla’s ability to deliver in-car entertainment once vehicles are driving themselves.

On the other hand, many people are doubting Tesla’s ability to deliver vehicles that truly can drive themselves without driver supervision.

Right now, I want to hear more about that effort and not in-car gaming.

Tesla was supposed to have a wider release of FSD beta this month and the update was also supposed to propagate to Canada.

We have yet to see that happen and I’d like to see more transparency from Tesla and Elon on that front. Maybe they could share some data from the limited release FSD beta.