Written by / Windsor
Editor/ Zhang Nan
Design / Leather
"Will Cyberpunk open on Model S and Model X in the future?" A tweet by game journalist Ryan McCaffrey was flipped by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
The world's richest man, keen to announce blockbuster news on social networks, revealed in a message that Tesla is working to port the game library on Steam to its own products.
Steam is one of the largest gaming platforms in the world, with tens of thousands of games on it. Once Musk's grand ambitions are realized, Tesla's car will be transformed into a fantasy game hall.
When the automobile industry underwent profound changes, automotive products developed in the direction of intelligence and networking, from means of transportation to large-scale mobile intelligent terminals, and the functions on mobile phones began to be applied to the car machine. Musk put it bluntly, "Entertainment will become critical as self-driving technology plays an increasingly important role in cars."
The conversion of fuel vehicles to electric vehicle tracks provides the feasibility of carrying forward the entertainment function in the car.
In the view of Zhang Xiaoliang, a member of the Xuanyuan Award jury, So.Car founder & CEO, from the perspective of practical scenarios, the biggest difference between the two is that electric vehicles have unimaginable playability in the scene of the third space, because in the static state, all functional appliances on the electric vehicle can operate normally, and there is no risk of carbon monoxide poisoning. As a result, electric vehicles can become a place for white-collar workers to take a nap, can also be used as a camping base, and can also become a video room and a game room.
According to App Annie's 2021 Mobile Game Market Report, in 2020, app user spending was $143 billion, of which $100 billion was spent on games, and nearly 70% of users in the mobile app business were on games. In 2020, users spent 296 billion hours on mobile games, up 35% year-over-year.
Young people are inseparable from the machine, and this group of game-loving Z generation is the mainstream of consumption in the automotive industry. No matter from which point of view, the game on the car is in line with the development logic of automotive products, the game is a scene that cannot be ignored by major car companies.
In this context, Chinese brands have become associated with games.
Wuling Hongguang MINIEV launched the GAMEBOY version, Chinese "Street Fighter", simply named after the game console; GAC Aean cooperated with Migu Express to launch the Aeon S Plus game set to create a cross-dimensional dream e-sports cabin concept, which includes a premium version of the gamepad; the parkour mobile game "Tom Cat Parkour" officially landed in the P5, G3i, G3 and other models of car app stores in March.
Going back further, as early as 2019, the Haval F7x coupe SUV was listed, and in order to show its car machine based on the Android 8.0 system, Haval had called a professional women's e-sports team RE-Girls to help. At the scene, the e-sports team and the media fought against the Haval Intelligent Network 2.0 car machine system for more than 10 minutes.
Through the game to narrow the distance between young consumers, highlighting the scientific and technological attributes of the product, in the fiercely competitive market, the major brands do their best, but as a means of transportation carrying life, will the game on the car hide hidden safety risks?
Software and hardware are in place, and cars become "locomotives"
Musk is a true fan of the game.
In 2020, some netizens once asked Musk what his favorite game was, and Musk listed 7 games: "Out of the Siege", "Half-Life 2", "Bioshock", "Mass Effect 2", "Fallout 3", "Fallout: New Vegas", and "Sopranos 4".
It is said that Musk's favorite thing to do during college was to play games in his dormitory, and even his girlfriend at the time complained that he played games for hours. Although Musk is obsessed with PC games, it does not prevent him from moving the game to his car.
On June 11, 2021, at the delivery event of the new Model S in 2021, Tesla demonstrated the game screen of "Cyberpunk 2077" based on the model S in-vehicle central control entertainment system. Tesla, which has a team of software engineers specializing in video games in Seattle, recently began working on another similar team in Austin.
Starting in 2019, the list of games available on Tesla Arcade, Tesla's in-house video game platform, slowly grew to nearly 20. This time, Tesla will pick up the pace. The reason is that in terms of hardware and software, the new cars represented by Tesla already have realistic conditions.
At computex 2021 in June 2021, AMD CEO Lisa Su said the company is working with Tesla to provide AMD Ryzen processors and RDNA2 graphics processors, and the new in-car entertainment system will provide up to 10 teraflops of computing power, roughly on par with consoles like the PlayStation 5.
In addition, tesla's latest version of the model S and Model X after the upgrade also uses a discrete graphics card from AMD, which has the same performance as sony PlayStation 5. Tesla's updated infotainment system comes with a 17-inch screen with a resolution of 2200×1300.
Musk also revealed that Tesla's latest version of the Model S and Model X will have more storage space and be able to process more games on the platform at the same time. The technology website videocardz and even the Tesla car machine system were compared with the parameters of the Sony PS5 and Xbox, and it was found that Tesla did not pull down and had great potential to become a "game bike".
On the other hand, Tesla's central control screen has an hdmi interface, and the owner can connect the central control screen in the car with NS, Microsoft or Sony games. Tesla has a rich external interface that can be connected to the gamepad.
"We look forward to providing a great gaming platform for gamers." Su Zifeng said.
Distinguish between drivers and passengers,
Can I avoid distracted driving?
In the summer of 2021, Vince Patton bought a Tesla Model 3, and he stumbled upon on YouTube that he could play video games on the large touchscreen in front of the dashboard while the vehicle was driving.
"I think it's definitely not right," Button said, looking for a parking lot experiment and finding that the Model 3 could indeed play card games while driving, "and I only did it for five seconds to turn it off," he said. ”
The New York Times article published on December 7, 2021, said that tesla package updates have added at least three games that drivers can open while the car is moving. Before the game starts, a warning appears on the screen (which indicates that Tesla is aware of the danger): when the vehicle is in motion, it is for the use of passengers only. A button will then pop up asking if the player is a passenger, but the driver can also start the game with a simple operation.
After the article was issued, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) quickly launched an investigation into the "in-car entertainment" function of Tesla Model 3, S, X and Y vehicles in 2017-2022, covering more than 580,000 Tesla vehicles from 2017 to 2022.
NHTSA said it is evaluating whether the feature has the potential to distract drivers and increase the risk of collisions. In today's unpopular automatic driving, distracted driving is becoming more and more common, and has become a social problem.
NHTSA data shows that Tesla cars with Autopilot in active state have had multiple traffic accidents since 2016, resulting in at least 12 deaths, and Jonathan Adkins, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), pointed out that Tesla's new video game features urgently need guidance and regulation from NHTSA.
After being named, Tesla, which has been playing cat and mouse games with NHTSA, immediately announced that it would stop people from playing video games while the vehicle was moving through a software update. Tesla informed NHTSA that the upcoming new software update system has locked the game's features and cannot be used while the vehicle is in motion.
In the new automobile era, automakers are treating automotive products with a contradictory attitude.
In order to reduce interference, they spared no effort to upgrade the voice control system so that the driver could move his mouth to complete the operation. For example, Stellantis offers an entertainment system that can play DVDs on the front screen, but if the car leaves the parking space, the screen turns black; the navigation system of many products does not allow manual entry of addresses while the car is driving; and some on-board systems can already order takeout coffee through voice operation.
But on the other hand, the new car is ambitiously transforming the car into a mobile living room with wheels, where passengers can stream movies and TV shows to entertain, turn on microphones to sing KTV, even play their favorite video games, or do something other than driving after activating the system.
Although automakers have made a clear distinction between driver and passenger areas, and also stipulated that entertainment systems can only be activated when parking, whether they can "do their part" as expected, and whether the co-pilot's hot game will affect the main driver, these questions will take time to answer, although the answer is likely to be a life.
Musk's attempt to carry the game library on Steam to the car also sparked a discussion between the two voices. The expectant expressed excitement, hoping to go further, if the front windshield could be made into a screen perfect, as if to transform the steering wheel into a gamepad. But there are also many voices that refuse, saying that they are not agreeing, "This is the new way of dying." One netizen wrote.