- If you have a sense of adventure, a Tesla, and some encouraging friends, you, too, could pull a stunt like this.
- Just as in the tabletop version of Jenga, the goal is to remove blocks without letting the tower fall over. But instead of a steady hand, you have to accelerate the Model X with a rope attached.
- Young YouTube star Ryan Trahan knows how to get attention for his videos, including almost 10 million views for a 24-hour Autopilot drive across the U.S.
Silly, lighthearted, and designed to show off the instant acceleration of a Tesla electric vehicle. That’s pretty much the best way to explain a recent YouTube video that uses a Model X to (checks notes) play a giant game of Jenga.
The video, by YouTube star Ryan Trahan, proves that all you really need—aside from the car itself and some friends who are game to play—is an idea, plus a few cameras and a sound-effects generator in the video editing booth.
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The rules for Trahan’s game are pretty simple. First, you build a huge Jenga tower out of cardboard boxes in an empty parking lot, making sure each one is labeled either to award or take away prize money or has some other gameplay feature (like forcing a “low-speed pull” on your next move by going no faster than 30 mph or causing in-game bankruptcy). Then, you rig a tall vertical pole to the Model X’s trailer hitch, attach some rope, and use it to connect the car to the blocks. After that, it’s simply a matter of accelerating at Ludicrous speed, trying not to knock down the tower, and seeing what prize money you won or lost.
Trahan’s rules would have the money transferred between players, but since Trahan is the star and earns the big advertiser dollars, it makes sense when—spoiler alert—his friends manage to yank out the $1000 cardboard brick.
It’s all in good fun and shows that electric vehicle fans like to play around with their rides just like your average shade-tree mechanic after putting something back together again. The video also seems to be a test by YouTube of how many ad breaks they can insert in a 12-and-a-half-minute upload.
This isn’t the only stunt Trahan has pulled with his Tesla. Earlier this year, he posted a drive from Texas, where he lives, to Chicago to test the Model X’s Autopilot for 24 hours. That one is getting close to 10 million views, and a scroll through his uploads shows that he’s got quite a following for his other videos, whether they include his Tesla or not. In 2018, he uploaded a video titled “The Rich Life of a Teenage YouTuber,” if that tells you something.
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A former Texas A&M cross-country runner who has long been into self-promotion, Trahan received a waiver from the NCAA in 2017 to remain eligible to compete in college sports and run his own company, but he had to keep the two realms separate. His 24-hour Tesla Autopilot video says that he dropped out of college, and the mildly NSFW Tesla Jenga video proves he’s figured out a way to keep himself going without school or athletics.
Source: Motor - aranddriver.com
