When Horizon 5 was released, a veteran gamer and I joked that it would be nice to play with the steering wheel in my car.
Playing a big game with a car system may sound like a fantasy, but for Musk, who has always been "radical", it seems to be a perfectly normal thing.
Musk recently said on Twitter that Tesla is currently working to introduce games on Steam into vehicles, with the goal of allowing developers to run most of the games in Steam without porting or modifying them.
▲ In the future, you may be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 in the car
With Steam, the joy of driving isn't just 1+1=2.
It's just, is this really reliable?
Get in the car and play Steam games together
Put the game on the car, Musk has been planning for a long time, in 2019, when Tesla launched the V10 car machine system on a large scale, it was perfectly ported the classic game "Teacup Head", supporting double controllers, and the co-driver can also play together.
Of course, in order to drive safety, although the car machine system provides games, the owner must play in scenarios such as the car stopping driving or charging.
▲"Teacup Head"
Originally, the touch interaction large-screen hardware quality in Tesla vehicles is good, the size is close to iPad, the picture quality performance is acceptable, and after the game blessing, it can be described as a tiger adding wings, and the owners also have one more reason to stay downstairs for 5 minutes after returning home.
The V11 car system, which was updated at the end of last year, is also enhancing the game audio-visual entertainment function, and there has been a lot of discussion about what games Tesla will launch.
▲ "The Witcher 3" has appeared in Tesla's promotional films
Now, the goal of Tesla car games is not limited to a single game, but most of the games in the Steam game library, and does not require large-scale porting or modification by developers.
It's almost like putting a high-performance PC on a Tesla car.
At this point, there may have been a lot of gamers who have begun to enjoy the good game time, but some people have put forward different views, "TeacupHead" is indeed a good game, but it does not have high performance requirements, and Cyberpunk 2077 was a proper PC performance killer when it was launched.
Tesla not only has to take care of the car machine system, support functions such as auxiliary automatic driving, but also set aside a lot of computing power for the game.
In this regard, Musk's response is also very simple, according to the report of foreign media electrek, Tesla will solve the performance problem through the high-performance game computer built into the car, and its computing processing power will reach 10 Teraflops.
What is the level of hash rate? The answer is close to Sony's next-generation console PS5.
Foreign media Videocardz introduced the logic diagram of Tesla's built-in system released by Patrick Schur, analyzed the possible configuration of this high-performance gaming computer on the vehicle, and sorted it out into a comparison chart.
▲ Image courtesy of Videocardz
The CPU may be the same as the PS5 and other hosts, using AMD's chip, while the memory is about 8GB, providing dual DisplayPort and HDMI 1.4 interfaces, with a wireless controller, you can play the game in any position in the car.
The charm of the game is immeasurable, although Tesla can only play when parking or charging, but a friend next to me who picked up the car last September still maintained the game time at least once a month, and spent a lot of happy times on his 2021 Model 3 standard endurance upgrade:
Recently addicted to "Cat Fighting Dragon", it has been more than 20 levels.
Once Steam really launches the Tesla model, car owners may not stay in the parking lot for 5 minutes, a variety of multiplayer online games join, the difficulty of players to find teammates may be greatly reduced, in the parking lot roar, you may be able to find a "two-person trip" friends.
▲ Finding teammates to play with was once a hot topic of discussion in the game "Two-Player Trip"
At that point, parking lots may really become a new generation of "Internet cafes".
How many people are willing to play AAA masterpieces in the car in the unseen future of autonomous driving?
The introduction of Steam is Tesla's further increase in the in-car entertainment system, but it is still not so easy to achieve.
The original "Cyberpunk 2077" due to system optimization reasons led to poor host experience, through the built-in gaming PC to improve performance, but also means that the old Model model may not enjoy Steam game services, even if the car computer computing power reaches the same level of PS5, may not be able to support all Steam games.
In addition to hardware, game compatibility will also have a certain impact, it is foreseeable that Tesla needs to communicate with game manufacturers or complete compatibility tests to ensure that car owners can play some Steam games on new models.
The game itself is a very complex field, and the game lineup is not only affected by hardware computing power and form, platform operation strategy, laws and regulations are one of the influencing factors.
The reason why Tesla attaches so much importance to the in-car entertainment system and spends a lot of resources to promote large-scale games into the car machine system is for automatic driving, as Musk has always emphasized:
Entertainment will become crucial when cars are driving autonomously.
After the popularization of autonomous driving, the car will become a "third space", similar ideas are no longer new, when people no longer need to focus on driving, the car naturally becomes an idle space, this free space is the desire of various entertainment services to occupy.
After all, free space, and even time, often means business profitability.
Tesla's vigorous development of car games behind, and the game service Tesla Arcade is closely related, before the player experience said that there are fewer games, more like a cake experience, once the real introduction of some Steam games, may evolve into a new paid subscription service.
Tesla has a precedent for selling traffic services, and the price of the assisted autopilot system FSD has changed many times, and when the game lineup is rich enough, after large AAA games such as Cyberpunk 2077 enter, it seems to be a natural thing to adjust the price of the service after the operating cost rises.
Foreign media electrek has repeatedly reported that Tesla has set up a game team to expand the corresponding staff. In this way, Tesla's revenue structure can also be optimized, and in addition to selling cars, software subscription services can continue to make profits.
Tesla's continued investment in gaming is conducive to building service and experience barriers.
▲Autonomous driving technology is not yet mature
However, the future of automatic driving can not be realized, car driving is always unable to leave the driver, computing power, technology, policies, etc. are restrictions, in this case, how many people are willing to pay for subscriptions, in parking or charging when playing large games?
Last year, because of a large number of driving accidents, the US auto safety regulator opened an investigation into Tesla's assisted autopilot system, and doubts about Tesla were also one after another. Musk even lowered his expectations for autonomous driving in an afterthought:
I believe that cars in the future will definitely have the ability to drive themselves, but do they need a driver?
Probably still needed, just like in the age of the automobile, in fact, horse-drawn carriages also existed.
Unlike consoles such as PS5 and Xbox Series X, it is not only the game lineup that restricts the development of the in-car game system, but also the limitation of play space and time.