It Seems Your Tesla Will Recognize A 3.5-Inch Floppy Disk Drive

It may look like a 3D-printed save icon, but 3.5-inch disks were the standard computer media format back in the late 1900s. USB flash drives have long since replaced them, but that didn't stop Oleg Kutkov from plugging a 3.5-inch disk drive into his Tesla, just to see what would happen. According to his post on X, the old tech still works, even in his modern vehicle.

Tom's Hardware elaborates further. The only special hardware required was a converter between the drive's FDD output and a USB. While that port is handy for hacking a Tesla, no software modification was required to read and play an MP3 music file off the disk ("Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley, of course). The drive whirs and chatters as it reads the data, and the music does skip a bit, but it works.

"It's nice that the Linux kernel still supports this subsystem," Kutkov wrote. "The system script mounts any detected disk drive (with some exceptions) as external storage for Sentry/Dashcam/media source. It's even possible to play a single MP3 file from the diskette." The converter also deserves a bit of credit, as he writes in a reply to a comment. "USB controller emulates TEAC USB UF000x – a generic USB floppy (Uniform Floppy Interface) that the Linux kernel supports."

Unfortunately, this doesn't mean we can dust off our old disks and play Wolfenstein 3D on a Tesla's screen. While it recognizes the drive, that won't let you hack its Linux-based operating system to install Lotus 1-2-3. While it is possible to hack a Tesla, you'll need something a bit more advanced to do it.

The biggest limitation, however, is what doomed the 3.5-inch floppy to obsolescence in the first place: its limited storage. While 1.44 megabytes was huge at a time when Bill Gates is falsely quoted as saying "640k ought to be enough for anybody," it's almost nothing by today's standards. I went looking for the "Never Gonna Give You Up" MP3 file and found it to be 9.1 MB, which would require seven disks to play the whole song. I thought six disks to install Windows 3.1 was a lot back in the day, but that entire operating system was smaller than a basic Rick Roll. Kutkov may have reduced the audio quality or trimmed the song down to just the beginning to play it in his video and make his point.

Kutkov did try to format the floppy disk for use with Tesla's Sentry feature, but it didn't work. That's no big loss, as the disk wouldn't be able to hold more than a second's worth of video anyway. To put this limitation into perspective with a modern example, Baldur's Gate 3 takes up 140.7 gigabytes of memory on my Xbox. One GB contains 1,024 MB. It would take roughly 100,000 3.5-inch floppies to store the game. Only the ill-fated Tesla Semi could transport that many disks.