Professional boss baby Elon Musk has a lot of…unique ideas (his recent decision to just stop paying rent on Twitter’s office as a “cost-cutting” measure stands among them), but at least he isn’t afraid to commit to the bit. After nearly a year of Musk imagining a Valve-compatible Tesla, the electric vehicle company has added Steam to its cars’ software with a holiday update issued December 13.
Tesla has been trying to craft its cars into very fragile, expensive gaming consoles for years. In 2018, Musk announced that his company was adding Atari games to their vehicles, which you could play while stationary. In 2019, you could play Cuphead; in 2020, Fallout Shelter; and in 2021, Musk claimed a Tesla Model S and X was essentially a PS5 with wheels.
Theoretically, at least. Recent model updates shut some owners out of playing vintage games in the scenic confines of a Walmart parking lot, and the PS5 thing never amounted to anything substantial. This Steam integration is the closest Tesla owners will get to playing Cyberpunk 2077 like Musk has been promising for over a year, though it only applies to Model S and X vehicles built in 2022 on “with 16GB DDR memory, and requires Premium Connectivity,” release notes say.
For cars that fit the criteria, owners can access Steam from the Tesla Arcade, sync their account to their car, and, sure, even play Cyberpunk, like the confidently titled teaser video “Your Tesla is Now A Gaming Rig” suggests.
“If I ever decide to fully live in a car, this would be great!” one enthusiastic YouTube commenter says. Since Musk, incomprehensibly one of the richest people in the world, isn’t willing to pay his rent, this is a good consideration for him, too.