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Tesla Arcade in China to get online multiplayer titles from Tencent
Tesla China plans to roll out three popular online games, a local weather app, an air quality alert system, and two streaming apps to its customers in the country in the first quarter of 2020. The official announcement as shared by Tesla owner-enthusiast Ray4Tesla on Twitter lists popular online titles Fight Landlords, Mahjong, and Happy Upgrade as part of the expected update. Tesla owners can play these games with their friends using their WeChat or QQ accounts.
These video games and apps are all products of Tencent Holdings, a Chinese multinational conglomerate with a market cap of about $461 billion that offers internet and mobile value-added services, advertising, and e-commerce transactions through its subsidiaries. In 2017, Tencent bought a 5% stake in Tesla, a strategic move that gave the electric car manufacturer a solid ally in China.
Fight Landlords, Mahjong, and Happy Upgrade are among the most popular Tencent Games played on QQ, an instant messaging app with more than 807 million users as of last year. Such games add color to the in-car entertainment system of Tesla that could provide a good boost to attract local, young, and tech-savvy car buyers in the country. Likewise, WeChat is also a property of Tencent and is the most popular messaging app in China with over a billion active users per month.
- Tesla China Multiplayer Video Games And Useful Apps (Source: Ray4Tesla | Twitter)
- Tesla China Multiplayer Video Games And Useful Apps (Source: Ray4Tesla | Twitter)
- Tesla China Multiplayer Video Games And Useful Apps (Source: Ray4Tesla | Twitter)
QQ and WeChat are prominent messaging and social media apps treasured by businesses in China where 91 percent of online users have social media accounts. Consumers use these platforms to communicate, research brands, play games, and engage in transactions. Tesla’s presence on these popular apps gives the company some leverage if it wants to crack the local market. This should give Tesla an edge against established brands such as BMW, GM, and Volkswagen, to name a new.
Video games are nothing new in Tesla cars as the electric car maker has practically turned its vehicles’ infotainment system into a gaming console that could be used while the cars are on Park. Tesla offers various games that appeal to a wide range of users such as classic Atari games, Chess, Beach Buggy Racing 2, and more recently, Cuphead.
As Tesla China prepares for its first deliveries of the Model 3, rolling out popular games and useful apps can also help the brand attract more buyers away from local competition. They can serve as talking points that can further strengthen word of mouth marketing that has saved Tesla millions in advertising costs too. Furthermore, such a move shows the local market that Tesla is fully-committed to provide owners in the country with the best user experience possible.
#Tesla 🇨🇳 officially announced 3 popular online games (“Fight Landlords”, “Mahjon”, “Happy Upgrade”) will be pushed to #Tesla owners in Q1, along w/ 2 streaming APPs, local weather plus air quality alert. Owners can log into their QQ or WeChat account to play remotely w/ others. pic.twitter.com/vrgRln21Wt
— Ray (@ray4tesla) December 20, 2019
This focus on its vehicles’ fun factor has been mentioned by CEO Elon Musk in the past. “The goal for the infotainment system is to say what’s the most amount of fun you can have in a car. I don’t think other car companies really think about it that way. It’s not just some sort of transport utility device with no soul and no character,” Musk said during the Q3 2019 earnings call.
Aside from the popular video games, the local weather app and air quality app come handy for consumers in China who live in areas with poor air quality.
As announced by the country’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology earlier this month, two variants of the locally-made Tesla Model 3 will receive subsidies from the government. Deliveries of Made-in-China Model 3s also appear to be just around the corner, with car carriers filled with the vehicle being spotted in Gigafactory 3’s holding lots.
The announcement of Tesla China coincides with Elon Musk’s tweet about Tesla’s upcoming 2019 holiday software update, which is expected to include a “sneak preview” of Full-Self Driving, new games, and possibly a number of video streaming apps.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s X will start using a Tesla-like software update strategy
The initiative seems designed to accelerate updates to the social media platform, while maintaining maximum transparency.
Elon Musk’s social media platform X will adopt a Tesla-esque approach to software updates for its algorithm.
The initiative seems designed to accelerate updates to the social media platform, while maintaining maximum transparency.
X’s updates to its updates
As per Musk in a post on X, the social media company will be making a new algorithm to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users. These updates would then be repeated every four weeks.
“We will make the new 𝕏 algorithm, including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users, open source in 7 days. This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed,” Musk wrote in his post.
The initiative somewhat mirrors Tesla’s over-the-air update model, where vehicle software is regularly refined and pushed to users with detailed release notes. This should allow users to better understand the details of X’s every update and foster a healthy feedback loop for the social media platform.
xAI and X
X, formerly Twitter, has been acquired by Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI last year. Since then, xAI has seen a rapid rise in valuation. Following the company’s the company’s upsized $20 billion Series E funding round, estimates now suggest that xAI is worth tens about $230 to $235 billion. That’s several times larger than Tesla when Elon Musk received his controversial 2018 CEO Performance Award.
As per xAI, the Series E funding round attracted a diverse group of investors, including Valor Equity Partners, Stepstone Group, Fidelity Management & Research Company, Qatar Investment Authority, MGX, and Baron Capital Group, among others. Strategic partners NVIDIA and Cisco Investments also continued support for building the world’s largest GPU clusters.
News
Tesla FSD Supervised wins MotorTrend’s Best Driver Assistance Award
The decision marks a notable reversal for the publication from prior years, with judges citing major real-world improvements that pushed Tesla’s latest FSD software ahead of every competing ADAS system.
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system has been named the best driver-assistance technology on the market, earning top honors at the 2026 MotorTrend Best Tech Awards.
The decision marks a notable reversal for the publication from prior years, with judges citing major real-world improvements that pushed Tesla’s latest FSD software ahead of every competing ADAS system. And it wasn’t even close.
MotorTrend reverses course
MotorTrend awarded Tesla FSD (Supervised) its 2026 Best Tech Driver Assistance title after extensive testing of the latest v14 software. The publication acknowledged that it had previously criticized earlier versions of FSD for erratic behavior and near-miss incidents, ultimately favoring rivals such as GM’s Super Cruise in earlier evaluations.
According to MotorTrend, the newest iteration of FSD resolved many of those shortcomings. Testers said v14 showed far smoother behavior in complex urban scenarios, including unprotected left turns, traffic circles, emergency vehicles, and dense city streets. While the system still requires constant driver supervision, judges concluded that no other advanced driver-assistance system currently matches its breadth of capability.
Unlike rival systems that rely on combinations of cameras, radar, lidar, and mapped highways, Tesla’s FSD operates using a camera-only approach and is capable of driving on city streets, rural roads, and freeways. MotorTrend stated that pure utility, the ability to handle nearly all road types, ultimately separated FSD from competitors like Ford BlueCruise, GM Super Cruise, and BMW’s Highway Assistant.
High cost and high capability
MotorTrend also addressed FSD’s pricing, which remains significantly higher than rival systems. Tesla currently charges $8,000 for a one-time purchase or $99 per month for a subscription, compared with far lower upfront and subscription costs from other automakers. The publication noted that the premium is justified given FSD’s unmatched scope and continuous software evolution.
Safety remained a central focus of the evaluation. While testers reported collision-free operation over thousands of miles, they noted ongoing concerns around FSD’s configurable driving modes, including options that allow aggressive driving and speeds beyond posted limits. MotorTrend emphasized that, like all Level 2 systems, FSD still depends on a fully attentive human driver at all times.
Despite those caveats, the publication concluded that Tesla’s rapid software progress fundamentally reshaped the competitive landscape. For drivers seeking the most capable hands-on driver-assistance system available today, MotorTrend concluded Tesla FSD (Supervised) now stands alone at the top.
News
Elon Musk’s Grokipedia surges to 5.6M articles, almost 79% of English Wikipedia
The explosive growth marks a major milestone for the AI-powered online encyclopedia, which was launched by Elon Musk’s xAI just months ago.
Elon Musk’s Grokipedia has grown to an impressive 5,615,201 articles as of today, closing in on 79% of the English Wikipedia’s current total of 7,119,376 articles.
The explosive growth marks a major milestone for the AI-powered online encyclopedia, which was launched by Elon Musk’s xAI just months ago. Needless to say, it would only be a matter of time before Grokipedia exceeds English Wikipedia in sheer volume.
Grokipedia’s rapid growth
xAI’s vision for Grokipedia emphasizes neutrality, while Grok’s reasoning capabilities allow for fast drafting and fact-checking. When Elon Musk announced the initiative in late September 2025, he noted that Grokipedia would be an improvement to Wikipedia because it would be designed to avoid bias.
At the time, Musk noted that Grokipedia “is a necessary step towards the xAI goal of understanding the Universe.”
Grokipedia was launched in late October, and while xAI was careful to list it only as Version 0.1 at the time, the online encyclopedia immediately earned praise. Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger highlighted the project’s innovative approach, noting how it leverages AI to fill knowledge gaps and enable rapid updates. Netizens also observed how Grokipedia tends to present articles in a more objective manner compared to Wikipedia, which is edited by humans.
Elon Musk’s ambitious plans
With 5,615,201 total articles, Grokipedia has now grown to almost 79% of English Wikipedia’s article base. This is incredibly quick, though Grokipedia remains text-only for now. xAI, for its part, has now updated the online encyclopedia’s iteration to v0.2.
Elon Musk has shared bold ideas for Grokipedia, including sending a record of the entire knowledge base to space as part of xAI’s mission to preserve and expand human understanding. At some point, Musk stated that Grokipedia will be renamed to Encyclopedia Galactica, and it will be sent to the cosmos.
“When Grokipedia is good enough (long way to go), we will change the name to Encyclopedia Galactica. It will be an open source distillation of all knowledge, including audio, images and video. Join xAI to help build the sci-fi version of the Library of Alexandria!” Musk wrote, adding in a later post that “Copies will be etched in stone and sent to the Moon, Mars and beyond. This time, it will not be lost.”


