Change your Tesla’s Color and Wheels With Tesla's Colorizer Feature

Tesla's Colorizer feature lets you customize the color of your Tesla

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Changing your Tesla’s color – whether through PPF/Vinyl or Paint, is a definite possibility. But how do you show those colors throughout the car’s software? Easy! Tesla’s Colorizer feature offers the ability to adjust the vehicle’s color in software.

You can even change what kind of wheels appear in the visualizations – a quick and easy way to match whatever you have on the car – as long as it’s a first-party wheel.

Where to Find the Colorizer

There are two ways to access Tesla’s Colorizer feature. You can go to the ToyBox app and choose Colorizer, or you can go to Controls > Software and tap on the colored square underneath your vehicle. Keep in mind this feature can only be accessed while the vehicle is parked.

Once enabled, you’ll be presented with the vehicle color wheel and menu – which offers a set of options to cater to your preferences. We’ll tackle some of those options a bit further down.

Where the Colorizer Feature Applies

Tesla's Colorizer feature even applies in the Beach Buggy Racing game

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So where do these colorizer changes apply? All throughout the vehicle, and in unexpected places too! It will display the chosen color directly in the visualization, both when parked and moving. These changes will also appear throughout settings and different parts of the car, including the mobile app, and even the Beach Buggy Racing game.

Keep in mind that the Colorizer is only available on Intel or AMD-based vehicles (MCU2+) vehicles – which means legacy vehicles won’t be able to benefit from these software color changes.

Colorizer Settings

The colorizer primarily offers a color wheel for easy selection of whatever hue you’d like to go with – whether for the day, or for longer. It also offers two other options – paint style, and trim style.

The three paint styles – Solid, Matte, and Metallic – are similar to regular car paints. The solid paint style is a flat color that matches most of Tesla’s paint offerings. The matte paint style is a bit smoother, and metallic is much more reflective. In our testing, matte often looks the best on screen.

Tesla also gives you two trim color options. Most legacy vehicles nowadays have chrome trims – and if you’d like to match that or you prefer chrome – you can also choose a chrome trim. Most modern vehicles have black – and it is selected by default.

Saving and Removing Presets

The Colorizer also offers you the ability to save presets – and to switch back to your car’s default paint – whatever it shipped with from the factory. The factory preset is located on the bottom right and quickly swaps the color back to the factory option if you can’t find one you’d like.

You can create new presets after deciding on a new color and pressing the plus box on the bottom left corner of the menu. This will add a new preset to the right of the plus icon. If you want to delete a preset, tap and hold on one, and an X will pop up – allowing you to delete that preset.

Changing Wheels in Software

You can also change your Tesla’s wheels from the car. Everywhere the Colorizer applies – these same changes apply.

You can access this by going to Settings (the grey vehicle icon), and then going down to the Service Menu. From there, select the Wheel and Tire sub-option on the right. You’ll be presented with a list of options.

However, keep in mind that selecting wheel options that do not match your current wheel size will impact your vehicle. Tesla provides a warning in this menu to not mismatch the wheel sizes – as it will impact range estimates and the vehicle’s speed display.

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Is Tesla Planning to Add Steam Support to All Vehicles?

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Yesterday, we reported that Tesla updated their Steam integration on Model S and Model X vehicles. The update was part of their 2024 Holiday Update, but it looks like there may be more to this than a simple update.

Steam, a video game library app, makes it easy for users to buy or launch games on their computers. However, a couple of years ago, Valve, who created Steam, launched their own standalone device, the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck runs a custom OS based on Linux.

Steam Launch

When Tesla launched the redesigned Model S and Model X, Tesla introduced a dedicated gaming GPU with 16GB of RAM and touted the ability to play top-tier PC games in Tesla vehicles.

In 2022, Tesla finally launched the Steam app for the Model S and Model X as part of its 2022 Holiday Update. The Steam app runs Steam OS, the same OS as the Steam Deck in a virtual environment.

However, earlier this year, Tesla stopped including the GPU and Steam (Beta) in their vehicles, and we haven’t seen any updates to the Steam in quite some time. In fact, we thought Tesla was axing their gaming-on-the-go dreams.

SteamOS Update

The Steam app, which is still in Beta, is getting an interesting update for the Model S and Model X vehicles with the discrete GPU.

Those vehicles received an update to SteamOS 3.6 - the same version of SteamOS that runs on the Steam Deck. While nothing has visually changed, there’s a long list of performance optimizations under the hood to get things running smoother.

Comparing Steam Deck to Tesla Vehicles

Let’s take a look at the Steam Deck - according to Valve, its onboard Zen4 CPU and GPU combined push a total of 2 TFlops of data, which is fairly respectable, but much lower than today’s home consoles. The Steam Deck is capable of 720p gaming fairly seamlessly on low-to-medium settings on the go and is also built on the AMD platform.

AMD-equipped Teslas, including the Model 3 and Model Y, are packing an older Zen+ (Zen 1.5) APU (processor with a combined CPU and GPU). AMD claims that the V1000 - the same embedded chip as on AMD Tesla vehicles (YE1807C3T4MFB), brings up to 3.6 TFLops of processing power with it, including 4K encoding and decoding with the integrated GPU on board.

While that’s not enough for 4K gaming or comparable to a full-blown console or desktop GPU, that’s enough raw horsepower for light gaming and is currently more powerful than the Steam Deck.

The Model S and Model X’s GPU brings that up to about 10TFlops of power - comparable to modern consoles like the Xbox Series X at 12 TFlops.

Steam Gaming for All Vehicles?

The fact that Tesla is updating SteamOS even though the feature is no longer available in any new vehicles could indicate that Tesla is not only bringing Steam back to Teslas but that it’s going to play a much bigger role.

While SteamOS is run in a virtual environment on top of Tesla’s own OS, we could see Tesla bring SteamOS to all of its current vehicles, including the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck. Steam in these vehicles would likely support any game that’s capable of running on the Steam Deck.

We think this Steam update, which includes performance improvements and a variety of fixes, has quietly passed under most people’s radars. This could be a very exciting update for those who enjoy gaming, especially for those who love to do it in their Tesla.

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Tesla Holiday Update Weather Features: All the Small Details

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As part of Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, Tesla included two awesome new features - Weather at Destination and the long-awaited Weather Radar Overlay. These two features are big upgrades built upon the weather feature that was added in update 2024.26. The original weather feature added an hourly forecast, as well as the chance of precipitation, UV index, Air Quality Index, and other data.

However, this update also added some smaller weather touches, such as the vehicle alerting you if the weather at the destination will be drastically different from the current weather.

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Weather At Destination

When you’re navigating to a destination and viewing the full navigation direction list, the text under the arrival time will show you the expected weather next to your destination. You can also tap this, and the full weather pop-up will show up, showing your destination's full set of weather information.

Note the weather under the arrival time

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You can also tap the weather icon at the top of the interface at any time and tap Destination to switch between the weather at your current location and the weather at your destination.

You’re probably considering that the weather at your destination doesn’t matter when you’re three hours away - but that’s all taken into account by the trip planner. It will add in both charge time and travel time and show you the weather at your destination at your expected arrival time.

And if the weather is drastically different or inclement, such as rain or snow, while you’ve got sunshine and rainbows - the weather will be shown above the destination ETA for a few moments before it tucks itself away.

Tesla also recently introduced a new voice command. Asking, “What’s the weather?” or something similar will now bring up Tesla’s weather popup.

The weather pop-up above the ETA

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One limitation, though—if you’re planning a long road trip that is more than a day of driving, the weather at destination feature won’t be available until you get closer.

Weather Radar Overlay

As part of the improvements to weather, Tesla has also added a radar overlay for precipitation. You can access the new radar overlay by tapping the map and then tapping the weather icon on the right side of the map. It’ll bring up a radar overlay centered on your vehicle. It’ll animate through the radar data over the last 3 hours so that you can see the direction of the storm, but you can also pause it at any point.

You’re able to scroll around in this view and see the weather anywhere, even if you zoom out. It also works while you’re driving, although it can be a little confusing if you’re trying to pay attention to the navigation system. If you like to have Points of Interest enabled on your map, the weather overlay will hide POIs except for Charging POIs.

Requirements / Data

Unfortunately, you’ll need Premium Connectivity for any of the weather features to work, and being on WiFi or using a hotspot will not be enough to get the data to show up. The data, including the weather radar, is provided by The Weather Channel.

As for supported models, weather and weather at destination are available on all vehicles except for the 2012-2020 Model S and Model X. The weather radar has more strict requirements and requires the newer AMD Ryzen-powered infotainment center available on the 2021+ Model S and Model X and more recent Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.

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