CEO Elon Musk is encouraging Tesla to have more games and entertainment in the car, which he sees as “critical” in an autonomous future.
Is he getting ahead?
Last weekend, Tesla started promoting a new software update that Mush had been publicizing as ‘fire’ for the past few weeks.
The update ended up consisting of some changes in the user interfaces and the main new features were 3 new car video games and the new ‘Boombox’ feature to play personalized sounds on external speakers.
Musk accompanied the update with several comments on video games and car entertainment, which he sees as “critical” to achieving autonomous direction:
He said yesterday:
“Entertainment will be paramount when cars are driving.”
The CEO announced that Tesla would bring an online multiplayer version of one of the games they released in the recent update and asked his followers what Tesla should do with games in the car once it reaches autonomous direction:
Currently, Tesla automotive video games can only be played when vehicles are parked.
Musk received many suggestions, including support for cloud gaming platforms like Stadia, but he was also screwed for focusing on that when autonomous driving is not resolved.
Tesla is currently missing Musk’s famous forecast of having “1 million robot axes by the end of 2020”.
The automaker’s interest in video games also goes beyond Musk’s tweets.
As we reported earlier, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle and has recently started to form a similar team in Austin.
Electrek’s Take
Is he getting ahead? Yes, I think he is. This appears to be a distraction from the fact that Tesla is missing another important FSD schedule presented by Elon.
At the moment, the focus really should be on resolving the autonomous management and not finding what to do when we achieve this.
No one is doubting Tesla’s ability to offer entertainment in the car, as the vehicles are driving.
On the other hand, many people are doubting Tesla’s ability to deliver vehicles that they can actually drive without driver supervision.
Now, I want to hear more about this effort and not about car games.
Tesla should have a broader FSD beta release this month and the update should also spread to Canada.
We have yet to see this happen and I would like to see more transparency from Tesla and Elon on that front. Perhaps they could share some limited-release FSD beta data.
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