The Best Tesla Frunk (Trunk) or Treat Ideas & Halloween Decorations

Chrisheninger/Reddit

Every Tesla has a frunk storage, and people use them for everything under the sun. But today, it's not about the sun but rather what’s under the pumpkin moon.

Let’s take a look at some of the best Frunk (or Trunk) or Treat ideas we’ve seen in previous years, and maybe they’ll be just what you need for a little inspiration.

Jaws

One of the easiest things to do is to turn your car into a shark with some nice and spikey teeth. Chrisheninger on Reddit dresses up his Tesla with Shark teeth every year and parks it out front for the trick-or-treaters! Take a look at the hero image above for a preview!

And it's pretty easy to do, too – you just need some white posterboard, tape, and a pair of scissors to get started. Fold the posterboard in half, then cut it into triangles of various sizes. Tape your triangles to the top and bottom of the frunk, and voila! Jaws!

For the bottom side, you can wedge the teeth into the gap between the body and the frunk, so you may not need tape there.

You can also get some clear cellophane tape and cover up the headlights to give them a nice orange or red glow.

Toothless

Jen's Toothless Tesla Dragon

jenstreet

This one is a bit of a bigger project. @jenstreet over on X posted an absolutely spectacular job of turning their Tesla into Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon!  We’re not going to get into how to do this – instead, Jen posted her own guide on how they did the project. Props to them for the very detailed instructions!

This is an absolutely spectacular way to showcase your creativity! You can read their guide here.

Model X Vampire Bat

A Vampire Bat Model X

Not a Tesla App

If you’re a creative Model X owner, you can turn your Model X into a vampire bat! All it takes is a few pieces of cardboard for the teeth, like with the Jaws decoration above. While in the example below, the enterprising user placed more teeth on the gullwing doors of the Model X, we recommend draping a few black sheets from the gullwing doors to complete the look, especially if you tear them up at the ends a bit.

Combine this with a well-thought-out Tesla Lightshow (more on this later), and you’ve got a seriously cool-looking vampiric Model X in your driveway.

Lightning McQueen

Not a Tesla App

Here’s a great and simple one if you have a red Tesla — Lightning McQueen. It can be as simple as buying a Lightning McQueen sunshade for less than $20 (Amazon link) and sticking it in your car. You can also go to the other extreme, like S.E. Robinson Jr., and get custom decals for your Tesla. Although there hasn’t been a new Cars movie since 2017, these movies are still insanely popular with young kids.

SERobinsonJr

Other Ideas

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You can always use the frunk in other unique ways too – there’s quite a bit of space in there. Put in a decorative gravestone or ghost or cover it up in decorative spider webbing. You can do pretty much whatever your heart desires with the frunk. You can even put in some battery-powered lighting and fog generator and give it an ominous glow.

If you’ve got an older Model S or Model X with a nosecone, there are some unique ideas you can use that for too – including short teeth with googly eyes on the hood. Less scary, but definitely still fun!

Boombox

Using the Boombox feature on your Tesla, combined with keeping it turned on through Camp Mode, will allow you to play all the creepy Halloween music you want to get the atmosphere just right. Maybe throw in a fog generator somewhere, and you’ll have one of the best Halloween attractions on the block!

p1ngz

Lightshow

You can use Tesla’s Lightshow functionality to take it a step further and sync the music and lights of your car – and if you’ve got a Model X – the gullwing doors too! That’ll really complete the entire Halloween ensemble.

Sadly, there is one catch with this one – you’ll need to keep re-enabling the Lightshow manually from inside the vehicle. Tesla has not yet released functionality for Lightshows to be played remotely from the Tesla app.

I wonder what we’re going to see for this year’s Frunk or Treat? Personally, I have a few things planned for this year, and this is also the first year we’ll see Cybertrucks participating. We’re excited to see what people do with the Cybertruck’s huge and automated frunk and unique shape.

Given the Cybertruck’s frunk also has 120V power in it, there are even more unique and interesting things one can do.

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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

Robert Rosenfeld / YouTube

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.

Not a Tesla App

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

Not a Tesla App

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

Not a Tesla App

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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