Tesla showrooms feel more like Apple Stores than a car dealership. Clean lines, minimal staff, and zero-pressure sales tactics. Now, they’re taking the philosophy one step further by introducing standalone Tesla dashboard displays to their retail locations.
Spotted in select showrooms, these new pedestals feature a fully functional Tesla center screen that supports everything from climate control to navigation and even gaming with the attached Xbox controller. This lets customers experience the full breadth of the user experience without ever setting foot in a Tesla.
Never seen this in a Tesla showroom before… pic.twitter.com/kmZPUDkUac
— Oli (@CARN0N) February 8, 2026
Reducing Friction
Getting into a car is a commitment, even at a Tesla showroom. You need to walk up to one of the cars on display, open the door, and get inside, but at busy locations, you’ll often have to wait for a turn with other customers. It also makes it easier for passersby who may be curious about the touchscreen but don’t want to bother getting into the car.
By placing the screen on a pedestal, Tesla is removing that friction entirely. It turns the UI into a more casual browsing experience. A curious customer can walk up, tap through the menus, play a game, or watch a theater clip just as easily as they can try out an iPad at an Apple Store.
This lowers the barrier to entry for the curious but shy customers who might otherwise be intimidated by sitting in a car at a showroom.
User Experience as a Product
This move also highlights another one of Tesla’s biggest and often underspoken advantages. For legacy automakers, the infotainment system is a liability, a last thought, something needed to present an interface to customers. It's clunky, slow, and kept hidden until you’ve seated the customer in the vehicle for a test drive.
For Tesla, the infotainment and software experience is the star of its own show. By isolating and highlighting it, Tesla is telling customers that it actually puts real effort and thought into its software - it isn’t just a screen - it is your primary method of interacting with your robotic chauffeur.
While the displays currently only function in Park, we expect Tesla’s teams to eventually capitalize on and expand these standalones display. Providing FSD visualizations or demonstrating the navigation or Supercharging process would be a fantastic step for customers who want a demo, without requiring them to interact with an employee to arrange a test drive.
Add the Tesla App
We’d love for Tesla to take this one step further and introduce a phone kiosk next to the Tesla display. The phone could allow people to interact with the “car,” and they’ll be able to turn on the climate, defrost the car, or see its location.
Tesla is also reinforcing its newest narrative that it is a technology and software company first, and a car company second. It invites customers to engage with the ecosystem before they even consider the hardware. In a world where software defines the ownership experience, this small addition to the showroom floor seems like a winning move.
