The frunk is the most underrated thing on this car

Nobody buys one of these for the trunk under the hood, and then you take one long trip and it turns into the thing you end up telling people about. I filled it with ice. Not a cooler set down inside it, I mean the frunk itself, ice poured straight in and drinks buried in the middle of it. There’s a drain plug in the bottom, so when it all melts it just goes away and you rinse it out. That solves a road trip, as far as I’m concerned. No cooler eating up a seat, nothing sliding around in back, no lid to wrestle with every time somebody wants a water. Walk up, open the hood, grab a drink. If you are shopping for one, my referral link gets you three free months of FSD.

I stand by how good that felt right up until physics weighed in. Here’s what I know for sure now: that tub is not insulated. At all. It’s a plastic box riding in the nose of a car that’s been baking on July asphalt, and the instant you put loose ice in there it starts melting, and not at ice-chest speed either. Accelerated. The heat soaking off the body of the car sees to that.

So in the middle of the trip I fixed it for thirty dollars. Three soft-sided cooler bags from Walmart, ten bucks apiece, loaded with ice, zipped shut, set side by side in the frunk. They’re squashy enough to conform to the tub, they fit like they were made for it, and they kept everything cold clear through the hot part of the day.

Tesla will happily sell you a molded frunk cooler for a couple hundred dollars, and I’m sure it’s a nice piece. But the three bags did the job, and when I got home they emptied out and folded flat on a garage shelf, which is more than any hard cooler I’ve ever owned can say. I don’t know that Tesla set out to build me an ice chest. I think what they did was give me a waterproof box with a drain in the bottom of it, and I took it from there. That’s the whole tip. Insulate the ice, not the car.