What caused Tesla to play Rick Astley?

A floppy disk meets a modern Tesla

A Ukrainian electronics engineer connected a decades-old floppy disk drive to a modern Tesla and used it to play Rick Astley.

The setup, in a nutshell, hinges on a simple but unusual bridge: the engineer used the Tesla’s glovebox USB port to recognize and power the old 3.5-inch floppy disk drive. The drive itself is about 45 years old, making the stunt a mix of nostalgia and hands-on hardware tinkering.

The key details

• Old hardware, modern vehicle: A 45-year-old floppy disk drive was repurposed to work with contemporary in-car connectivity.
• Tesla USB interface: The Tesla’s glovebox USB port served as the link that allowed the device to be used inside the car.
• A pop-culture outcome: The result was the ability to play Rick Astley—essentially turning a retro storage format into a modern audio trigger.

Why it matters

This kind of experiment illustrates how quickly the “last-mile” of technology can be rethought. Instead of treating legacy media as dead-end artifacts, the engineer treated it as a controllable input that can be adapted to new ecosystems.

It’s also a reminder of how car interiors are becoming more like general-purpose computer peripherals: the presence of USB ports and standardized interfaces enables creative—sometimes humorous—projects that would have been far harder to do in earlier vehicle generations.

While the exact technical method for all compatibility details isn’t provided here, the headline takeaway is clear: a retro floppy drive can still be made to interact with modern electronics when the interfaces line up—turning the vehicle into a platform for playful, physical computing experiments.