Tesla preparing for Steam games, will support external storage

By Lennon Cihak
Tesla to support external drives for games
Tesla to support external drives for games
Bram Van Oost

Tesla is expected to support external storage devices in an upcoming software update, according to Tesla hacker @greentheonly.

Teslas already support an external drive for storing dashcam and Sentry Mode footage, as well as local music files. It looks like Tesla may soon support games on an external drive as well.

This news comes on the heels of Elon Musk saying that Tesla is working on making Steam games playable in the car and will show a demo of their progress this month.

Tesla's internal hard drive is divided into several partitions, one of which is allocated solely for Tesla Arcade.

The size of the internal drive on a Tesla varies by model and MCU version. The smallest drive comes with MCU 1 at 8GB with an added SD card that is utilized for maps, however, not many games are supported for MCU 1 vehicles and Steam games are not expected to be available for MCU 1 vehicles.

Teslas equipped with MCU 2 include a 64GB drive and would likely benefit most from an external drive, as MCU 3 vehicles include much larger drives (up to 256GB NVMe drives, depending on the model and year).

According to Green, the ability to use external storage isn't user-facing yet, and it's not clear whether it'd be available for all vehicles.

Most USB ports in a Tesla are USB 2, which is only capable of transferring speeds of up to 60MB/s, which is slower than most portable hard drives available today. The only USB 3 port available is in the glove box, but it's only available on newer Teslas.

It's not clear whether Tesla would require a USB 3 port for external storage, as that would provide the best experience when loading content off the USB drive.

@Greentheonly also mentioned that games will be able to be installed and deleted by the user, which will be critical when you're managing a large library of games. Theora and VPX codecs will be added as well. Theora and VPX are video compression methods that could allow a larger variety of content available in Teslas.

Unfortunately, MCU 2 do not appear to be upgradeable to MCU 3, due to “totally different power and other harness and thickness of the unit,” according to @Greentheonly.

Tesla’s newer and more powerful AMD Ryzen-powered processor is showing a significant increase in performance across the board. The web browser and video streaming services like Netflix and YouTube are much more responsive.

Tesla’s most recent software updates have included significant improvements and new features, including energy prediction improvements, seat belt system enhancements, adaptive suspension adjustments when approaching rough roads, and the green traffic light chime for non-FSD vehicles, among others.

Tesla Reveals Robotaxi App and Names the Robotaxi the CyberCab

By Cláudio Afonso

Tesla has invested billions of dollars over the years toward vehicle autonomy. The mission continues as Elon Musk and Tesla now prepare to unveil their ride-hailing product, Robotaxi this August. Or, as Musk called it on Tuesday, Tesla CyberCab.

Early Days

Five years ago, during Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day in April 2019, Elon Musk said he felt “very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla in the following year [2020]”. At the time, Musk added a bolder claim, predicting that Tesla wouldn’t even make cars with steering wheels or pedals by 2022. While timeliness may not be Musk’s strong suit, he has a track record for getting things done that others were unwilling to try or thought were impossible. Musk later admitted he can be overly optimistic and said “sometimes I am not on time, but I get it done.” 

Now, 5 years later, we have the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August 8th. After the release of FSD v12, it’s clear that we’re much closer to autonomy than we were in 2019, although FSD v12 is still a far cry from full autonomy.

While Tesla still has the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August, Tesla announced yesterday that it’d be prioritizing a simpler “next-gen” model that could be released by early 2025.

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On the conference call, Musk added that Tesla now has over 300 million miles driven with FSD v12 since it was launched just last month. He added that it's becoming “very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy”.

Tesla said it has been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems necessary to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service. The company is confident that it can establish a scalable and profitable autonomous driving business by employing a vision-only architecture.

think of it [Tesla] as combination of Airbnb and Uber meaning that there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates

Tesla = Uber + AirBnb

Later on, Elon Musk unveiled that the new service will operate and result in a mix between Uber and Airbnb where the Tesla driver decides if and when he wants his Tesla to be used and by whom. Tesla stated:

“We believe the Tesla software experience is best-in-class across all our products, and plan to seamlessly layer ride-hailing into the Tesla App.”

Tesla’s CEO clarified that the owners will be able to add or remove their car from the fleet “whenever they want” adding that it will be up to them to decide if they want to only let the car be used “by friends and family or only by five-star users or by anyone at any time”. The flexible program will, just like Airbnb, allow the owners to take the car out of the market when they want.

The upcoming ride-hailing service will enable users to easily request a Tesla vehicle, control the car's temperature, monitor its real-time location, and adjust the audio system. The only question is when.

Musk Teases New Model for Early 2025 That Will Use a Mix of Next-Gen and Current Platforms

By Cláudio Afonso

“We have updated our future vehicle line-up to accelerate the launch of new models ahead of our previously communicated start of production in the second half of 2025”. This was one of the key sentences that were part of Tesla’s deck shared on Tuesday directly before its financial results.

Since Reuters’ report a few weeks ago saying Tesla had “scrapped” the highly expected cheaper model— which Elon quickly denied on X —retail and institutional shareholders started asking for more details on Tesla’s product roadmap for 2024 and beyond.

In the earnings conference call, Elon Musk reiterated that Tesla expects to launch the next model in “early 2025, if not late this year”.

“We've updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models ahead of previously mentioned start of production in the second half of 2025. So, we expect it to be more like the early 2025, if not late this year. “

Over concerns of temporary production halts to update the factories for these new models, Musk said that Tesla will produce new models with certain aspects from their next-generation platform and current models. This will reduce the number of changes needed on production lines and allow Tesla not only to ramp up production faster but also to get the vehicles to market quicker.

Model Y Redesign

Tesla appears to hit that their next-gen vehicle will be less “next-gen” than they were initially aiming for, but to get a new vehicle out the door by late 2024, the process would already have to be in motion. Tesla may likely be referring to the redesigned Model Y, which is expected to reuse many parts from the new Model 3. Earlier this year, Tesla said that the redesigned Model Y will not be released this year, so it makes sense that they’re looking to speed up that production.

Tesla CEO concluded by saying that these measures will allow Tesla to reach a capacity of over 3 million units. Tesla produced 1.84 million vehicles in 2023. However, this year they’re ramping up Cybertruck production and introduced the new Model 3 into new markets.

And we think this should allow us to get to over 3 million vehicles of capacity when realized to the full extent.

Tesla reported on Tuesday its earnings results followed by a conference call where it teased its upcoming Robotaxi and its next-generation platform saying its “purpose-built Robotaxi product will continue to pursue a revolutionary ‘unboxed’ manufacturing strategy”.

Earlier in the day, Tesla announced the new Performance variant of its sedan Model 3 with deliveries in the United States starting already next month. The new version starts at $45,490 (after applying the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit) and goes from 0 to 60mph in 2.9 seconds.

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