Elon Musk: Video-Conferencing Coming To Teslas

A friend of mine recently told me that he uses his Tesla Model 3 as a quiet room for conference calls while working at home to get away from his kids. Pretty soon he won’t need to take his phone to get on the call.

Even video calls.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on Twitter yesterday that video conferencing is “definitely a future feature” for Teslas. Probably not, of course, when they are moving or being driven … or at least not until self-driving technology is good enough to handle all road conditions without a supervising human driver.

Ultimately, however, that’s the future: being driven while you’re watching a movie or, in this case, working.

Most know that Tesla cars have a large screen. In the Model 3, the most of the car’s functions are controlled by a 15” touchscreen mounted on the dash between the driver and the passenger seat. Fewer know that the car has an in-cabin camera aimed at the driver and passenger cabin. Musk has said it was initially include as a security measure to prevent people from trashing your Tesla when it was in operation as a robo-taxi.

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(In April of 2019, Musk announced plans to launch a driverless taxi service in 2020. So far, there’s no evidence that this will actually launch, or if the company launches it, will be street legal in any country.)

But clearly, if there’s a camera and a large screen available — and you can give vocal commands to your Tesla, so there’s a microphone — all the hardware necessary for video conferencing is available. That’s something that, given COVID-19 and working from home, would be very, very useful.

Or we could just use it for karaoke, which Tesla already supports. Or live-streaming ourselves. All it takes is software, and that’s what Musk is now saying will be coming.

At some point.

Probably before the robo-taxi fleet.