Tesla Arcade: Games You Can Play in Your Car
Waiting out a charge is a lot more fun when the car is also a games console, and Tesla Arcade turns the central screen into exactly that. It is a genuine built-in feature, not a workaround, with a catalogue that ranges from quick time-killers to, on the right hardware, full-blown PC titles, all playable while the car is parked.
What Tesla Arcade is
Arcade lives in the Application Launcher on the central screen and gathers the car’s games in one place. It is built for downtime: a charging stop, a wait outside a shop, a few minutes to spare. The games run on the car’s own hardware and display on the main screen, and like every interactive feature they are locked to Park, so nobody is gaming on the move. For a quick blast between errands, it is one of the more charming things the car does.
The games on offer
The built-in line-up mixes genres. Beach Buggy Racing is the crowd-pleaser, a kart racer in the spirit of Mario Kart that uses the steering wheel to drive. Stardew Valley offers a gentler, farming-life pace for a longer sit. There is Mahjong for a calm tile-matching session, and Tesla periodically adds novelties, such as a SpaceX docking simulator that has you guiding a capsule to the International Space Station. New titles arrive with software updates, so the collection grows over time. It is worth checking the Arcade after a big update, since some of the additions, like the docking simulator, are genuinely novel rather than filler.
Steam on Model S and Model X
The headline act is Steam, added in late 2022, which brings thousands of PC games to the car, from Cyberpunk 2077 to The Witcher 3. There is a significant catch: Steam runs only on the newer Model S and Model X, specifically the versions with 16GB of memory and the graphics muscle to handle it, and it needs Premium Connectivity. Model 3 and Model Y, whose AMD Ryzen infotainment lacks a discrete GPU, are not part of the Steam story. It is a genuine gaming platform, but a hardware-gated one.
Controllers and the wheel
How you play depends on the game. Casual titles use the steering wheel and its buttons or the touchscreen, which is fine for a kart racer but awkward for anything more involved. That is where Bluetooth controllers come in: pair one from the Bluetooth panel, and recent console pads work well, transforming a Steam session on a Model S into something close to a living-room setup. For serious play, a controller is not a luxury but close to a necessity, and even an inexpensive second-hand pad transforms how the games feel.
When to play, and the battery question
Gaming in a parked car raises the obvious worry about battery, and in practice it is a small one. The screen and the car’s computer draw modest power, so a session of casual Arcade games barely moves the state of charge, and even a longer Steam session on a Model S is comfortably affordable if you are not near empty. The natural time to play is while charging, when energy is flowing in anyway and you have twenty or thirty minutes to fill. Because everything is locked to Park, there is no question of gaming on the move, which keeps the feature firmly in the downtime category where it belongs. Plug in, pick a game, and a wait at a Supercharger stops feeling like a wait at all, which is really what the Arcade is for: turning the unavoidable pauses of electric driving into something you might almost look forward to.
Android games beyond the Arcade
The obvious gap is Model 3 and Model Y owners, who get the built-in Arcade but not Steam. TaaDa fills part of it, letting you run Android games from your phone on the car screen through Android Auto, using the phone’s own power and connection. It will not match a Model S running Cyberpunk, but it puts a huge library of mobile games on the dashboard of the cars that Steam leaves out, which for a lot of owners is exactly the point.