Bummer: Tesla's 'gaming computer' that it built a car around for some reason will be 'no longer capable of playing Steam games'

HardwareBummer: Tesla’s ‘gaming computer’ that it built a car around for some reason will be ‘no longer capable of playing Steam games’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Tesla)

Tesla 2021 Model S interior

Tesla’s attempt at creating the strangest case for a PC ever devised—that is, building an entire car around a computer—is now dead. As it stands, your Model X and S Teslas will no longer come with Steam integration, making them basically useless. Unless you want to drive them from one location to another instead of playing videogames, I guess.

Launched December 2022, the cars’ Steam integrations allowed drivers to play games—while actuallydriving,for a while, though the US government’s investigation into that clear nonsense led to the feature being disabled unless you were parked or recharging. Still, the idea of a car coming packed with a straight-up gaming PC is the kind of fun, speculative-futurist add-on that Tesla banks its whole image on.

It’s not currently believed that owners who bought these models before the change will be impacted—however, those still waiting for delivery appear to have had their new vehicles’ Steam support swept out from under them, as per ther/teslamotors subreddit.

As a handful of commenters in the ensuingthread point out, this isn’t much of a shock: “you’re either at home with a real gaming computer or somewhere else where you have other things to do. I only really see it as useful if you had to wait for many hours in your car for some reason”. Another commenteradds: “they probably realised it’s a car”.

Since we’re stillmilesaway from a car you can leave to move itself without requiring its driver’s attention in case of emergencies, most uses of the in-built PC became niche, to say the least—and if you want to play games in your car while waiting to pick up your kids from school, you can just use a laptop or a Steam deck. That’s a lot of money to put into a feature with already-existing, sensible alternatives that anyone with the moolah to buy a Tesla with a gaming PC in it probably already has.

It couldalsohave something to do with the"unpatchable" vulnerability in AMD chipswhich let Tesla users jailbreak their own cars last year, accessing all the paywalled features in these models. You know, things the car can physicallydo,but you can’t make it do until you flash your credit card at Musk. Supremely normal way for a car to work.

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