Tesla’s response to getting maps updates over LTE or service center WiFi
forums.tesla.com
forums.tesla.com
Apple has had a related download policy: they won't let you download major iOS updates over cellular data, and require wifi or USB data cable to install them. I believe Apple does this as a result of carrier pressure, however I don't think Apple has publicly stated this (Apple rarely does so).
A lot of people seem to forget that cellular bandwidth is finite, and that wireless congestion is a real problem today.
[0] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/firmware-update-2018...
We’re only talking about 200k clients here, unlike Google in which each byte of bandwidth reduction is multiplied by hundreds of millions of phones.
Then on the car you take the old file and the diff to generate the new file.
Also, it's wonderful that the web page about it uses a Pentium at 200 MHz as the performance reference platform (at 45 KB/s). :)
I think what people are asking here is too much; it’s not an unrealistic expectation that someone to find wifi occasionally in order to receive free updates.
You do have to compare if the old file is the correct, but not only is that extremely basic (I mean, it's comparing a filename), even if you manage to muck it up, the previously mentioned check will make sure the incorrectly generated file won't be applied, since the signature won't be valid.
It'll have whatever Tesla wants it to have. Even if they receive the file as a binary blob, they can attach whatever metadata they want when transferring it to the car. A filename would just be what I'd use, but the specific format is irrelevant.
Everything in software engineering seems simple if you dont look at the details. (...)
And some actually are. But in any case, I never actually said it was simple. I rebutted specific reasons you gave. Is it complicated for other reasons? Sure, maybe, who knows.
My understanding is that the new database uses vector rendering rather than rendering image tiles and it’s supposed to be much better than before.
This is also why so many Tesla owners are so keen to switch over to it.
Common sense really. Apple would get two complaints if they didn't do this. 1. From people who blew through their data allowances pulling the update. 2. From the networks and everyone else once the network bogs down every update. (Apple doesn't stage rollout like most manufacturers do)
Related: The 11.2 update had carrier specific modifications made to wifi calling. On networks where congestion was a bigger problem, wifi calling gets preferred. On networks with coverage issues, but less congestion... cellular is preferred if it's there.
>A lot of people seem to forget that cellular bandwidth is finite, and that wireless congestion is a real problem today.
They also seem to think Tesla would get some sort of a deal from the networks for all this bulk data.
I only have unlimited 4G SIM and all my internet usage is either on my phone or through my other devices using mobile hotspot. I don't want to pay extra money to carriers for home broadband with wifi since I already have super fast unlimited mobile connection (it's fast enough for Twitch/Netflix streaming so I really don't need dedicated line).
I'd like to make this configurable so people like me don't have to go to Starbucks or other places with public wifi to download updates.
You missed complaint #2. While your plan says unlimited, physics doesn't work that way. It's only fast right now because people aren't pulling large update files in all at the same time. I would not want to be in a populated area trying to use the network on update day. Rush hour at train stations is bad enough...
I’d assume few hundred MBs or even few GBs of updates every couple of weeks can’t be of significance.
I think Netflix, YouTube and Twitch traffic are much bigger concern for carriers.
EDIT: Weird, I thought when I first hit reply, there was no mention of App Store, but I see we're on the same page with this one :)
When I visited Sri Lanka, $8 at the airport got me a SIM card and something like 16 GB of data. ~4GB during the day, and the rest at night. So blatantly rational.
Wireless congestion is not a problem at 3am. I've worked at an ISP long enough to know what consumer access patterns look like.
But I don't if other software, including other Microsoft products, respect this indication.
Everyone knows a interrupted update isn't good and downloading several times isn't good either.
No need to park at a Starbucks, have your customers tether their cars to their phones, or overload the wifi at the service centers.
A small piece of software could be created to “handhold” the user though the process of downloading the update file, format a usb stick and copy the update file to it. Look at the Windows 10 media creation tools as an example of preping a usb stick easily.
Once the stick is prepped and inserted into the car, the car should take over and do the rest. Just inform the user that the update is taking place and prompt them once completed that they can remove the stick (when save to do so if they are already on the move)
Have the car look for update.img in the root of the usb on insertion, validate the signature of the file, validate the file isn’t a downgrade, decrypt, install and delete the file once completed automatically.
Friends and family can also be a source of help to download the file onto a usb stick.
Or just make and sell a cheap device (basically a low-spec tablet dedicated to a single app) that can connect to WiFi, say in the users home, and then be taken to the car and act as a hotspot with no upstream connection and deliver the update. (You can probably make it even smaller and cheaper with no screen if you want to offload the UI to a smartphone app; at which point you can probably have it hang off a keychain.)
Hell with the size of WiFi enabled microprocessors these days (something like an esp8266 paired with enough flash to hold the updates) you could prob squeeze it right into the cars keyfob itself. Though I would want the wifi processor to be separate from the keyfobs key processor.
Edit: Wireless charging of the fob so the car keeps the fob charged. When the car detects an update is available via its lte connection it wakes up the more power hungry WiFi chip in the fob via induction or something (trying to keep the “cars keys” processor separated from the WiFi processor) and a notice on the cars dash or an push notification to the cars companion phone app notifies the user of an update. If the fob knows of a WiFi station it can listen for that beacon and then download the update. If not found after a while goes into a pairing mode for connection to a phone/tablet like you say by offloading the UI.
Would need some polish to make it user friendly but yeah... I’m liking the idea.
> I still believe that updating your car using a USB stick is too complex for average consumer.
After the Jeep Hack Chrysler offered the update via a mailed out USB stick, A download for self update or allow a dealership mechanic to do it for you.
If an update just needs an USB insert to apply and if you can't prep it yourself, can't get a friend/family member/work colleague to assist, not have the ability to download it via wifi than a trip to a dealership or a local mechanic to do it for you can't really be out of the question.
As the OP post was about map updates, if the car is no longer in a region the company has a presence I wouldn't find it unreasonable if the company charge for the cost of the stick and postage. A "recall update" such like with the jeep issue I would expect the company to foot the bill of the extra postage (as they would be on the hook for the cost of shipping out the stick from and to the original country of purchase anyway).
Entrusting non-technical people with installing via USB sticks is not something I'd want to do. As others pointed out Windows allows it for installing their OS, but installing Map updates should be orders of magnitude simpler.
If the customers are going to go to the service centres to get the stick - better just to offer them a coffee there whilst the updates are downloaded over the service WiFi.
I mean FFS, downloads through a local server over WiFi is gonna be way faster than downloading through the internet over WiFi anyways!
And the servers are cheap, not to mention they probably already have spare computing power at a dealership to get this working!
Tesla has only 200k cars on the road. 5 gigabytes of data download off peak is pennies.
Can this possibly be the official corporate position?
There should be entire 2 semester course in biz school about how to scale without ending up with corporate policies creeping in that are so mind-bendingly stupid that everyone starts wondering if the company leadership is a bunch of 12-year-olds laughing behind a gym somewhere.
Why is it a problem if Tesla does the same thing?
Because Tesla isn't selling a smartphone that users in places where parking and living space aren't immediately adjacent so as to share a wifi router can reliably be expected to carry into their home, where they can connect to their in-home network, but a car which is a very different device.
Also, map data updates are necessary to maintain function, unlike major iOS updates, which provide new function.
I've read some people saying it would be impossible because the infotainment system controls everything. Well every car I've been in with carplay also has the native car ui to control stuff so I don't get the problem. Of course it's about control over the whole experience. Can't be giving consumers a choice.
Edit: I say this as someone that plans on eventually buying a model s. I’m just waiting for the technology to mature.
What Tesla should do is allow people to receive updates at a service center (or at superchargers), either manually from a technician or just automatically in the background with a known Tesla WiFi network that the car knows how to connect to when at a service center. Hell, the service center could even keep cached copies of the downloads locally to speed things up.
And they're the ones who have a Roadster roaming in space.
It was the only way to get a decent wifi signal :-p
But it’s kind of a shock they don’t offer updates via USB. Throw a digital signature on the download to help against unsigned code, encrypt the contents and restrict access to the download to verified owners if they are worried about offering a download of maps they brought from someone else and have the key delivered to the car via LTE via their already inplace vpn the cars use to phone home to the mothership.
Car manufacturers have been offering updates to built in gps devices for years via CD/DVD/USB to none connected cars, kind of a shock that Tesla don’t offer this upgrade method.
USB is an attack vector - USB descriptor attacks have been used to hack systems in the past.
I don't think it's unreasonable for them to balk at spending $2mil to push a huge data blob out over a free connection that was probably originally scoped purely for small (<100mb) firmware updates.
Hence the large size of this update: the entire base map is now stored in the car rather than downloading local tiles as needed.
It sounds like the other half of the issue is that there's no way to force the car to check for updates. That should be quick to add... in the next update (heh).
Edit: The original poster on the Tesla forum did say they usually got their updates a couple of weeks after they were released. Maybe, to get around this very problem, the car waits for a while in hope of a friendly WiFi connection before resorting to LTE?
There are obvious solutions to WiFi-less home parking for a company with their very own charger network, but they take initiative, commitment and acknowledging the problem. I'm pretty sure that pointing out all the ways of how a given happy path solution won't work for everybody is not how you make a career at a company like Tesla.
Why not offer optional LTE map updates for an additional fee? I guess I hadn't thought much about how Tesla pushes software and map updates. WiFi makes sense but I would assume it doesn't work well for some people. I know my WiFi signal in my garage and driveway is quite poor due to the architecture of my house and I assume the large number of WiFi networks in my neighbourhood.
And as far as the reasoning for why they can't offer it at their service centre -- seems like an issue easily solved by a QoS feature on a router.
I wouldn't be so sure of that. Operators can and do gouge for data when they know they can get away with it, including rates over what retail would typically be.[1][2]
These are large file downloads and you can best believe operators are not going to give 'bulk discount rates' just to have their network slowed down every time Tesla pushes an update.
You can't trigger the update, so you have to leave your phone with the car (remember that the whole problem here is that parking is too remote from living space to share wifi) for an extended period of time and hope for the update to trigger.
And, from the comment on the article page by the author, they've tried that: I have put my phone in hotspot mode for literally 5 days, left it in one car, and connected both cars (at home, just one car at work because my wife works somewhere else) to my iPhone hotspot, leaving me completely phone-less except for once-a-day charging sessions at home. Despite this, because there is NO way to trigger a “guaranteed” maps/nav update (sounds like Elon will only allow triggering firmware updates), I might need to be without my phone for weeks on end.
Tesla's the only car manufacturer selling vehicles that supposedly have full autonomy hardware with full autonomy itself a near-future firmware update away.
That becomes meaningless hype on a whole new level if the many owners the Tesla rep acknowledges have stated a need for this can get firmware updates but not map updates.
I'm shocked that the complaint comes from the SF area of all places, there is probably a higher density of WiFi there than anywhere else on the planet.
The updates can't be triggered by the user, so you have to leave your car somewhere (or your phone in your car) for a extended period of time to hope to get an update.
There's also not free public parking everywhere (much less free public parking with WiFi coverage), especially in the urban areas where “my parking is remote from my living space and doesn't share wifi with it” is most likely to be an issue.
Also, outside of certain urban areas (and this can still be a problem outside of urban areas) there isn't free public WiFi everywhere.
It's not a peculiar edge case; the Tesla rep explicitly notes in the reaponse it's an issue that Tesla has heard about from many owners.
The underground garage may be a problem, but if the car is parked outside, it should work fine.
[1] at least lat year, I had the telephone/DSL cable cut and to provide remporarily the connectivity of the office quickly put together a Wi-Fi based on that, that we call in jargon "soapbar", the one I got was a Huawei E5330: https://www.eprice.it/router-wifi-HUAWEI/d-5730696
I perfectly agree with you on the fact that it represents an example of poor (actually extremely poor) management of the customer assistance and that Tesla should have provided quickly (and hopefully politely, avoiding the small economics lesson that sounded - at least to me - a little bit patronizing) a solution to the issue.
But I was approaching the issue at a slightly different angle, the OP on the forum has two cars, of a value of nearly or around 200,000 US$.
Their income must be proportional to that, the 3G/4G router, might be worth 60-70 US$ if DIY, and possibly 100-150 US$ if having someone configuring it, i.e. a minimal fraction of their income, if I had those two cars and felt the need to have the road maps updated in a timely fashion, I would have first solved the issue.
The fact that for a tag price of 80,000-100,000 US$ per each car I would expect not one but two (one under the driver and one under the passenger seat, in case the first one doesn't work) such little modems as a complimentary courtesy by Tesla would be secundary to solving the problem at hand and have those maps updated.
Similar to your expensive data plan, Tesla also has to pay for the LTE connection in your vehicle, thus we cannot offer this option.
Oh come on, even my AU$40 prepaid sim includes gigabytes per month.
And which carrier wouldn’t jump at the chance to advertise “We partner with Telsa to provide you unmetered firmware and maps updates, simple set your phone as a wifi hotspot and connect your Tesla to take advantage of this offer”.
Telsa might still pay a fee, but it would be a fraction of what you or I would pay for the same amount of quota.
It would be moot if you just charged a premium for LTE maps updates for the subset of customers who need it. Heck, price it right, and it'll probably be profitable, and also make owners happier.
Also I'm wondering why updates are generally fat blobs instead of deltas.
First, the comments about USB - I can fully understand them. USB has been repeatedly shown to be an insecure medium (pretty much by design, it relies on the device being honest about its intentions) and Tesla is probably justified in not exposing a USB port to the customer. At the same time, it's been proven that Tesla's infotainment (eugh, I hate that word!) system runs Ubuntu, so they should really be publishing the source code for it anyway.
Second, if this very large download is really a problem that even service centres can't offer it without affecting their own operational bandwidth, why not install a caching proxy in each service centre? Hardly expensive hardware, an RPi with a USB disk would be enough, then the connected cars can download from the cache instead of straight from Tesla each time? Multiple cars in parallel would not be a problem.
As a side note, yes, pushing large downloads over cellular connections are expensive. It suits the carriers to have this model; in the UK, when smartphones first came out, unlimited-data plans were common, but very quickly vanished from the market when the carriers realised how many people would take the offer literally. Even now, the carrier I'm on offers unlimited data on the phone, but has a cap on tethering (it's Android, so I have no idea how it's detectable, but...). Compared to the likes of Apple, who have uncountable millions of devices and could easily lean on carriers to make OTA OS updates free, Tesla are comparatively small fries with less than a million cars on the road. They're mostly propped up by investor funding at the moment and are not even turning a profit (last I heard) yet. Not a good position to be arguing with carriers from.
And if Tesla are complaining about their own bandwidth distributing these large updates, they obviously need to talk to someone like Akamai and get their updates onto a CDN.
Don't like USB? Allow the Tesla app to grab the map updates and then dump them to the car next time it connects.
If they're trying to grab the file in one massive 8GB chunk, stop it and grab smaller bits as they can.
Hell, bittorrent it from other Teslas while you're sitting in traffic.
> I have put my phone in hotspot mode for literally 5 days, left it in one car, and connected both cars (at home, just one car at work because my wife works somewhere else) to my iPhone hotspot, leaving me completely phone-less except for once-a-day charging sessions at home. Despite this, because there is NO way to trigger a “guaranteed” maps/nav update (sounds like Elon will only allow triggering firmware updates), I might need to be without my phone for weeks on end. That’s obviously not a reasonable solution.
PS: Isn't this a major problem for anybody who lives in an apartment, though?
I'm honestly quite surprised that Teslas have both Wi-Fi and LTE but can't be updated via a similar method.
The person complaining did try. Made his iPhone a hot spot, put it in the car and left it there for days. But the update wasn’t triggered.
Seems like a very user friendly solution to me.