Great Scott! Tesla hides 'Back to the Future' Easter egg on app
Where we're going, we don't need roads...
The latest Tesla Easter egg discovered this weekend is expertly hidden deep within the electric car's mobile phone app. It's making Tesla-owning Back to the Future fans scream"Great Scott!"
The 1985 classic sci-fi film starring a very young Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown is all about time traveling in a classy old DeLorean. Tesla's Model S, X, and 3 aren't time machines, but they get close.
In the app when the car is has 121 miles of battery range left, you click the battery icon and Back to the Future mode takes over, turning it into a Model X with the same falcon-wing doors as the DeLorean DMC-12. That number is significant: 1.21 gigawatts of power sends Doc into a tizzy.
The app then goes deep into movie reference territory, with an option to turn "Time Circuits On," that then transforms to "Outatime." The next service schedule is set to Nov. 5, 1955 -- the date Doc invents the flux capacitor to get the car to the future. There are nuggets like this everywhere. Take a look at the transformation. For this Tesla Model S owner, his car turned into a Model X:
The level of detail in Back to the Future mode is impressive with reference to 88 mph, the speed necessary to hit "temporal displacement" to nuclear plutonium fuel. Even the VIN connects back to the movie.
After all, nobody calls Tesla chicken.
Topics Tesla
Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.
