Are you one of those people who thinks they could pay attention to the responsibilities of driving while gaming? What about just watching a game while driving? Who hasn’t streamed a bit of Twitch on a long drive, am I right?
Well, Elon Musk has solved that problem by building a game console into modern Tesla cars. A new report from the New York Times claims that you can play three games while driving — a far cry from the over 20 games that can be played when the car is parked. The games are Solitare, a jet fighting title called Sky Force Reloaded and a strategy game, Battle of Polytopia: Moonrise.
In all seriousness, I assume these games are unlocked so the passenger can play while they wait to get to their destination. Even then, I still think it’s a bit of an unnecessary distraction for the driver. The report mentions that when you open Solitaire, the game displays the following warning: “Solitaire is a game for everyone, but playing while the car is in motion is only for passengers.” The game also plays on the right side of the screen instead of being full screen, so it’s closer to the passenger.
However, there’s no mention of a warning on the other two games, leading me to believe that they don’t have one. Also, since Solitare is the only game I could see someone attempting to play while locked in traffic or while using autopilot, the fact that it features a warning heavily suggests Tesla knows that people can, and likely will, play these games while driving.
Distracted driving is already a massive problem and these games won’t help with that. Passengers also arguably don’t need access to games like this since the vast majority of people have a smartphone they can paly games on. We’ve already seen people trying to drive Tesla vehicles while sitting in the backseat, so there really is no end to humans’ stupidity when it comes to driving.
Driving.ca also mentions that if Telsa implemented technology like GM’s SuperCruise that used eye-tracking, this could be less of an issue.
Source: The New York Times, Driving.ca
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