CEO Elon Musk is urging Tesla to have more in-vehicle games and entertainment that he sees as “important” in the future of autonomous driving.
Is he ahead of himself?
Last weekend, Tesla launched a push for a new software update that Musk had touted as “fire” over the past few weeks.
The update consisted of several user interface changes, with the main new features being three new in-vehicle video games and a new “boombox” feature that plays custom sounds from external speakers.
Musk has followed up on updates with some comments on in-vehicle video games and entertainment that it considers “important” in achieving autonomous driving.
He said yesterday:
“Entertainment is very important when a car drives itself.”
The CEO announced that it will offer an online multiplayer version of one of the games that Tesla released in a recent update, and asked its followers what Tesla should do with in-vehicle games after achieving autonomous driving.
Currently, Tesla’s in-vehicle video games can only be played when the vehicle is parked.
Musk received many suggestions, including support for cloud gaming platforms like Stadia, but was roasted to focus on this when autonomous driving wasn’t resolved.
Tesla is now overlooking Musk’s famous prediction of having “one million robot axes by the end of 2020.”
Car makers’ interest in video games also goes beyond Musk’s tweets.
As previously reported, Tesla has a team of software engineers working on video games in Seattle, and recently started building a similar team in Austin.
Electrek take
Is he ahead of himself? Yes, I think so. This feels like a distraction from the fact that Tesla is missing another important FSD timeline proposed by Eron.
For now, the focus is on the solution of autonomous driving, not finding out what to do when it is achieved.
Once the car starts driving, no one doubts Tesla’s ability to provide in-car entertainment.
On the other hand, many doubt Tesla’s ability to provide a vehicle that can truly drive itself without driver supervision.
For now, I would like to know more about the effort, not the in-car game.
Tesla plans to release a wider FSD beta starting this month, and the update will be propagated to Canada as well.
We haven’t seen it happen yet, and I want to see more transparency from Tesla and Eron on that front. Maybe they can share some data from the limited release FSD beta.
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