Elon Musk teases Grand Theft Auto V in the Tesla, but how is that possible?

People seem to love when Tesla adds new playable games to the infotainment systems of their vehicles, and as time goes by, the Big T has become increasingly ambitious with the types of games they carry.

First, we saw some retro games, mainly Atari games, followed by light games like Fallout Shelter. He got more serious with a racing game that allowed you to drive and brake with the vehicle’s steering wheel and pedals. Then CEO Elon Musk scoffed that The Witcher would come to Tesla, though that has not materialized, and is now speaking of Grand Theft Auto V on Twitter.

We’ve reached out to Tesla for more information, but so far, we’ve received no response, which means it’s time for wild speculation. First, we need to determine if the Model 3 could even run a game like GTA V, and if so, could it do it well enough to make it fun to play?

Well for starters, let’s take a look at the system requirements for Grand Theft Auto V. Not surprising, since the game came out in 2013, it’s pretty easy to run even on basic hardware. The minimum PC specs are a quad core CPU with a clock speed of around 2.5 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, a video card with 1 GB of video RAM and the huge amount of 65 GB of space in the HDD. The recommended specifications are basically twice the minimum.

While those are “will run on a potato” requirements for a PC, can Tesla’s MCU2 as found in Model 3 handle them? Well based on CPU only, we would say no. The MCU2 runs on Intel’s Atom E8000 series CPU, which meets the quad-core count required by Rockstar Games, but it only runs at 1.04 GHz, less than half of what the game wants.

What you don’t take into account is Tesla’s powerful internal autopilot equipment, as seen in the current HW3 setup on all Teslas. The question is whether car engineers could find a way to make a game run on hardware that probably wasn’t designed with that in mind, and frankly, it’s a different possibility.

Playing now:
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These modifications of Grand Theft Auto V are crazy

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We know that Tesla’s FSD computer will perform 72 teraflops (one teraflop is 1 million floating point operations per second), using its two AI chips. At the same time, the new Mac pro – for example – it is capable of 56 teraflops, which means that the Tesla FSD hardware is a deciding factor. Microsoft rates its Xbox One X at just 12 teraflops.

Despite the large number of excavations, Roadshow has not been able to accurately determine how Tesla Arcade games are driven by the car, so we cannot conclusively say whether GTA V is likely from a hardware point of view. Still, if so, it would appear that there are plenty of other modern games as well, with some tweaking by Tesla engineers, of course.

If you don’t want to wait for new games to arrive on your Tesla, you can check out an existing app called Rainway that will run games on your home PC and stream them directly to your car screen. You can use a wired Xbox or Playstation controller to play them. It’s a workaround, sure, but when you tell your friends that your Model 3 can, in fact, run Crysis, you’re just lying.

Playing now:
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Tesla Arcade just made gaming in the car so much more fun!

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