Elon Musk said he is testing Steam integration in vehicles

Elon Musk is busy, but he even takes the time to play video games. Tesla CEO told his 105.6 million followers on Twitter that he was playing games. But if you’re Musk, this still works. He tested the highly anticipated Steam integration with Tesla. It’s not known which of the 30,000 Steam games he was playing (or should I say testing), but the fact that he’s telling the world he’s trying it out could mean its release is imminent.

Steam is to the PC gaming world what Tesla is to the electric vehicle market. With nearly 20 years under its belt, Steam accounts for an estimated 75 percent of the global market share for PC game distribution. There are over 100 million users on the platform and it shows no signs of slowing down. In addition, it releases Steam Decks, a mobile device to take all those games with you.

Tesla’s gaming doesn’t quite compare to Steam, with about 20 games available, and most of them are classics. However, this integration could move Tesla’s gaming platform light years ahead. The new Model S and Model X even have a game console that keeps pace with PlayStation 5 and XBox Series X.

The new system has ten teraflops of computing power. A teraflop is the computer world’s version of horsepower, and yes, 10 is a lot. The PS5 has 10.28 and for those keeping score, the Playstation 4 has 1.84. For anyone who has played the two consoles, you can testify that you immediately notice the difference that those extra 8 TFLOPS provide.

Musk wants the Tesla to be the most fun you can have in a car. By adding this kind of computing power to the Model S and Model X, he makes sure the system can handle the top video games. He has demonstrated the game that is considered the most graphically demanding, Cyberpunk 2077. These complex and visually stunning video games also take up a lot of space. The average Steam user has 55 games on their account. However, it seems that Tesla has already started to fix these problems.

With Tesla update 2022.24, Tesla now lets you remove games from Tesla Arcade. There’s currently no need to uninstall a game because there’s plenty of storage, but that won’t always be the case.

Tesla has also started adding code to support external storage that can be used to load additional games.

The amount of storage space available for games depends on the MCU in the vehicle. While vehicles with MCU 2 only contain a 64 GB hard drive for the entire vehicle (OS, games and data), newer vehicles with MCU 3 contain an SSD drive of up to 256 GB. Of that 256GB, 155GB is currently reserved for games, so they can store significantly more games before needing an external hard drive.

While there is still no release date for the Steam integration, there is a big event on the horizon for Tesla, AI Day Part II. The event was originally scheduled for August 19, but has been postponed to September 30. Musk has promised “a lot of cool updates” on AI Day; maybe steam integration is one of them.

Tesla Expands Its FSD Beta Program With Beta 10.69.2.1

Elon Musk says there will be an FSD Beta update with “additional polish” in a few days.

Musk took to Twitter to announce that “10.69.2.1” [is] comes out in a few days with extra polish. 10.69.3 will be released shortly after AI Day.”

In addition, Tesla will expand its beta program to additional users who have achieved a safety score of 80 or higher once version 10.69.2.1 is released.

FSD Beta 10.69.2.1 comes about a week after they roll out version 10.69.2 to 100,000 beta testers. Musk hasn’t made it clear how long after the update comes out, Tesla will extend it to additional testers, but it could be in the coming weeks.

Version 10.69.3, Musk says, will be released “soon after” AI Day, but it’s not clear what improvements it will bring.

Tesla’s second AI day is scheduled for September 30 and will feature “a lot of cool updates,” Musk said. At the event, the auto company is expected to share details about Full Self-Driving Beta, their new self-driving chip and the Dojo supercomputer, and hopefully updates on its Robotaxi program and FSD HW4.

There’s a chance Tesla will also talk about its recent work on integrating Steam gaming into its vehicles.

Finally, and perhaps the most exciting part, Tesla is expected to show off a working prototype of its Tesla bot known as Optimus.

You can watch Tesla’s first AI Day event from last year below.

Tesla looks poised to add high-resolution radar to its vehicles

An unidentified part has appeared in Tesla’s parts catalog and the internet is confused. Twitter user and popular Tesla hacker, @greentheonly spotted the item on a schedule.

This mystery item is marked but suspiciously without a name, part number or description. However, given his experience with the inner workings of these vehicles, Green believes it is a new Tesla radar. In a follow-up tweethe redoubled his stance, saying the part matches the high-resolution radar that Tesla registered with the US Federal Communications Commission in June.

This latest twist has left hundreds of Reddit users in Tesla’s unofficial community scratching their heads. The comment that was voted highest is from iphoneman321, who posted: Radar is dead, long live radar.

A year ago, Tesla announced it was switching to Tesla Vision, a camera-based technology without the aid of a radar or perhaps interference. The support section of Tesla’s webpage reads: Beginning with deliveries in May 2021, Model 3 and Model Y vehicles built for the North American market will no longer be equipped with radar. Instead, these will be the first Tesla vehicles to rely on camera vision and neural net processing to deliver Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, Full-Self Driving and certain active safety features.

Elon Musk clearly prefers that the cameras collect data to maneuver the vehicle, not the radar. In April 2021 he has responded to a tweet from @WholeMarsBlog who questioned the removal of radar. It read: Can you tell us more about your thinking behind the pure vision approach? Many people who argue that no radar is a step backwards. Why did you decide it was better not to use it? Musk replied: If radar and vision disagree, which one do you believe? Vision has much more precision, so it’s better to double vision than sensor fusion.

But in an interview with Electrek later that year, he left the door open to bring radar back to Tesla. Electrek quoted Musk as saying, “A very high-resolution radar would be better than pure sight, but such a radar doesn’t exist. I mean, visibility with high-resolution radar would be better than pure sight.”

Musk repeated that comment in February via Twitter: Only very high resolution radar is relevant.

Tesla’s AI Day Part II is on September 30, and Musk has promised “a lot of cool updates.” He has also said that Tesla’s work on Full Self Driving has been groundbreaking in artificial intelligence. It is therefore conceivable that the CEO will introduce a new high-res radar to the world in the coming AI Day.