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.
