The Steam gamers in our office experienced mixed feelings after the December 2022 holiday update announcing Steam Beta integration. After testing, we were pretty unhappy with the user experience. While Steam integration to Tesla infotainment is exciting in principle, the in-built Tesla storage, and current implementation is falling drastically short.
Model S owner’s manual states that 64GB of internal storage needs to be reserved for DashCam, and only the remaining is available for Steam and other purposes. This is about 80 to 100 GB.
What if you get the sudden urge to play something else while waiting at a supercharger? Or maybe you and wife are both avid gamers playing your own different games but drive just one car. Maybe both kids also have their own games going on.
In addition, downloading is super janky. We’ve found that if there is any kind of drop in packets at all, whether from your Wifi or your internet provider, the download disappears. You have to restart each time. That is extremely frustrating! It took me 3 nights to download Cyberpunk because of this reason.
The download stoppage issue is an interesting one. We may have discovered a fix. In our testing, we’ve found that the door opening, after starting a download, has caused the download to reset. The reason is that Dashcam starts recording. The car will only write to one drive at a time, and because you have a partition, the writing to your gaming partition stops. To keep this from happening, disable Dashcam overnight when downloading a game. This will keep the car from switching, and should keep your download more stable.
We’ve read that this may be fixed with the latest update, but have not yet tested. We will be paying close attention to it.
Let us know if you have any questions about Steam use, or SSD in Tesla in the comments.
Model S owner’s manual states that 64GB of internal storage needs to be reserved for DashCam, and only the remaining is available for Steam and other purposes. This is about 80 to 100 GB.
So the problem is?
Any large game such as Cyberpunk 2077 or Hogwarts Legacy easily occupies 70 to 90 GB alone. That leaves just with almost no more space.What if you get the sudden urge to play something else while waiting at a supercharger? Or maybe you and wife are both avid gamers playing your own different games but drive just one car. Maybe both kids also have their own games going on.
In addition, downloading is super janky. We’ve found that if there is any kind of drop in packets at all, whether from your Wifi or your internet provider, the download disappears. You have to restart each time. That is extremely frustrating! It took me 3 nights to download Cyberpunk because of this reason.
Potential Fixes?
For storage, the fix is simple - get an SSD. There are many options out there, including the one from Tesla. Theirs is 1 TB, which allows you to partition in the car, but the price tag is hefty, at $350. Our team got together and designed one with a Cybertruck feel that is around ⅓ of the price, and it will also allow partitioning.The download stoppage issue is an interesting one. We may have discovered a fix. In our testing, we’ve found that the door opening, after starting a download, has caused the download to reset. The reason is that Dashcam starts recording. The car will only write to one drive at a time, and because you have a partition, the writing to your gaming partition stops. To keep this from happening, disable Dashcam overnight when downloading a game. This will keep the car from switching, and should keep your download more stable.
We’ve read that this may be fixed with the latest update, but have not yet tested. We will be paying close attention to it.
More info on our design Jowua’s 1TB SSD?
If you are in the market for an alternative to the Tesla SSD, consider ours. Our engineering team knows the cars inside and out, so it’s built specifically for Tesla. Here are some other features to consider.- First, it allows uninterrupted Steam gaming thanks to the 10GBps data transfer rate. Tesla SSD on has Sequential Read/Write Speed of up to 2300/1150 MB/s
- Second, the storage is sufficient for storing at least 10 average-sized Steam games needing close to 100 GB per game
- Third, our triple heat dissipation system enabled the SSD to withstand extreme cabin temperatures from -40°F to 185°F (-40°C to 85°C) which is the same as Tesla SSD, but Jowua SSD offers 10x the data transfer rate
- Fourth, it’s sleek and compact to easily fit the center console, armrest, and the glovebox.
- Finally, there is a combo version, where you can get 2 game controllers and one SSD for less than $200. Still $150 lesser than the cost of 1 Tesla SSD
Let us know if you have any questions about Steam use, or SSD in Tesla in the comments.
