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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

Tesla software experience far outshines CarPlay and Android Auto.

Wake me up when you can open the glove compartment without drilling down a menu on a touchscreen because that is certainly not what I call good UI.

I don't get that either. The rest of Tesla's UX is so good, I don't know how they botched this. Is it a cost optimization? Any PMs over there care of chime in?

edit: Locking the glovebox is a great use case, but not the typical one.

I'm not a PM, but I found this really weird initially, too. Then I realized I could start safely storing things in the glovebox conveniently - behind a code, no physical key necessary. It changed my mind and I started considering it well thought out.

I am somewhat surprised it's not one of the actions you can customize on the hotbar. I have no doubts that if people complained about it, Tesla would add it.

In older cars (early 00s and before) you could lock the glove box with your ignition key.

Some had a valet key that wouldn’t open the glovebox

There's no reason why it couldn't be lockable while still having a physical button to open.

I've never been in a Tesla but does that mean that you can't pull it open with your hands?

I'll put that into a checklist of things to try whenever I'll buy my next car.

Correct. Worst rental car experience of my life.

OMG, thanks. I'll put Tesla on my no buy / no rent list.

Press right button on steering wheel - say "open glovebox". Works every time in a split second even with my terrible English accent

Personally, I am impressed that you can say that phrase in a split second. Takes me at least a second and a half. Which is a second longer than pressing the glovebox open button in my boring old car.

Can you give examples of this? I was recently looking for a car and saw the discounts and credits for a Tesla and thought it was finally time to go electric. Then I started researching the interface and saw so many people talking about how clunky it was and they decided to just use bluetooth with their phone to listen to music rather than the interface or even worse hacks where they setup a web server on their phone to mirror to the interface and have to type urls so they can use waze.

My wife has a Honda CRV with android auto and it works great when I drive it. We both use Youtube Premium (formerly Google Music) for our music and I use (soon to be going away) Google Podcasts for my podcasts. Those both work great with Android Auto. My understanding from looking it up is that it is near impossible to use non-supported software with a tesla without ugly hacks. My experience with Android Auto is good that it, or something better, is an absolute requirement on my next car. From my research, it seemed like Tesla added more walled garden annoyances than improvements.

My personal opinion:

1. The navigation works really well for me. Including routing via superchargers

2. The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)

3. The screen is very responsive. Touch UI is fast.

4. The backup and side camera view is the best I’ve seen on cars.

5. Record the last X minutes from all cameras when you honk (someone backed into my car and it’s nice to have easy access to the video footage via the usb stick)

6. Auto defogging.

7. Heating and de-icing the car from the app when I’m having breakfast.

8. Autosteer (the free included one) works surprisingly well. It handles more roads and situations than I’ve seen on other manufacturers

9. Auto detect different drivers from the phone key and sets their seat/steering/settings (and even their spotify account)

There’s dozen more small things that show the attention to detail that some car manufacturers also have in their hardware but almost never have in their software.

It’s not all perfect (eg the Spotify app could be better) but it’s a lot better than any other car or rental I’ve been in, including carplay).

2-8 do sound great. They are the reasons I was looking at a Tesla. Hadn't even heard of some of those. The car I'm looking to replace is a 2009 toyota corolla commuter car that is really starting to have maintenance issues. The right speakers even stopped working a few years ago. The speaker on my phone is better so I just put the sound all the way up and use that. The audio sucks, but it's easy. I sit down, press play, and I'm listening to what I want.

My wife's CRV is a 2018 which I only drive when we are driving long distances. Still, I just plug my phone in and all my data is there on android auto. I have starred places on google maps going back almost 15 years. I click a place on recents and it maps me there. I press shuffle on youtube music and it has all my history there to play through. Youtube music also has the download option so I can play music in non-signal areas. That was another thing I couldn't seem to find an answer for with a Tesla. Does spotify work without a signal? If so, how much storage does the tesla offer to spotify? I have multi-gigs of downloaded music on my phone. We hit 30+ minute terrible signal areas on our holiday travels to family.

The options seemed to be switch my apps to spotify/tesla navigation for "car riding" and have to double-entry everything from my home-listening or completely switchover. Which could maybe work for spotify (does that have the same option to upload your own music that google music had?), but definitely wouldn't work for tesla navigation. Then there's the privacy concerns that I'm now sharing more data with two places rather than one. Then the added monthly fee of using Tesla's data plan vs. android auto being free. All that made me think that getting a tesla would only increase my annoyances and costs rather than providing me a benefit. The advantages you listed are really, really nice, but hard to justify with the rest of it.

FWIW a lot of the things in 2-8 aren't unique to Tesla.

My non-Tesla does 3, 4 (camera view seems higher res than the Model Y I test drove, although I don't find the blind spot cameras that helpful because you have to take your eyes off the road to use them), 6, 7, 8 (Although I don't have enough experience to say how Tesla's compares), and 9 (except the Spotify bit, but since I use Android Auto and anyone who DJs in my car has either that or Carplay it's a non-issue)

You're also a paying customer of one of those services that you're sharing data with. It doesn't automatically mean that they'll be any better, and Tesla has had quite a few privacy-related fuckups, but one is in the business of selling your data, the other isn't. Take it for what it's worth. Lately they've been pushing quite a lot of privacy related things, but it may just be virtue signalling on their part. One feature I really like is the ability to share a destination from Google Maps on my phone to the car and it will instantly route there.

For some strange reason the Spotify app in Tesla doens't have the option to download playlists, it will only buffer ahead and cache things. I've had it happen that it stopped playing because it lost connectivity and I tried to shuffle ahead quite a few times. I think all Teslas come with at least 60GB of internal user accessible storage, you can also expand that by just plugging in a USB-drive in the glovebox. The Tidal app in Tesla does offer offline playlists, and much higher bitrate. I think Tesla is doing their audio engineers a disservice by the atrocious bitrate that they provide through the Spotify and Apple Music app. And Tidal is borderline unusable if you want innovative and ground breaking features like Shuffle, but apparently that is coming this "holiday update".

You don't need to have a "Premium Subscription" to use Spotify or any other streaming service in a Tesla, you just set up a hotspot on your phone and it will automatically connect to it. I've also seen some people connect a mobile hotspot to the glovebox USB-port. Some of them even come with additional storage and things like internal battery so it'll stay connected even when the car powers down the infotainment system. If you have an iPhone it's a little more convoluted, but it's easily sorted out with just using a Shortcut to enable hotspot that fires automatically when it connects to your car.

Tesla does a lot of things very well, and some things just don't make any sense at all. Like when they removed the "repeat playlist" option in Spotify for a year or so. It made impossible to use shuffle, as you'd usually reach the end of the playlist within a couple of shuffles, and it would just change to radio or something. It still supported the option, I could toggle it on in the Spotify app on my phone, they just removed the UI element. Luckily it came back not that long ago.

I was doubting for a while until I took a test drive. You can ask for the last test drive on Saturday evening and keep it till Monday morning. At least here in Belgium that works and you get to properly test it. Which helped to try out the baby and kid chairs we use.

> The UX of not needing a key. The bluetooth phone key works so much more reliably than other car manufacturers (n=1)

But do you still have a key?

My phone ran out of battery some 80 km far from home last Thursday because I forgot to charge it. I could enter my car and drive back home because I open it and start the engine with a traditional physical key.

I slip the key card between my phone case and it works fine.

Yeah, a card. A very inconvenient form factor compared to a key. I forgot that new cars use cards more and more. A key can be put in a pocket and never breaks. A card needs a holder to protect it.

I don’t have one, but something I can just put in my wallet as opposed to another thing that needs to be in my pocket seems nice.

You can always get a key fob, you just have to buy it separately.

I'll never go back to a car without being able to use my phone as a (reliable) key and store the credit card sized backup key in my wallet. Because it's just that - a backup key. In over two years I've used the key a total of zero times. And one thing I've noticed is that key fobs seems to become bigger and bigger, every year. Just look at the new Volvo key fob. It's the same size as AirPods charging case.

I do have the keycard in my wallet but often travel without it. On longer trips, my wife is usually with us so we have two phone keys and the likelihood of both of us forgetting to charge are slim ( also, the wireless pads in the car is where you usually store it )

Additionally, if I were to be stranded somewhere there are 2 other people with phone keys that I could contact for them to remotely open the car, or just find a charger somewhere.

I have had more bad luck losing physical phone keys in the past.

Agree, Tesla software is amazing. Have had a Model 3 for 1.5 years; I think I love the remote climate most of all, living in Melbourne, Australia.

I bought a BMW i4, not a Tesla 3, so this is just my comparison. But Tesla software works really well, they have navigation to chargers, something that doesn’t really work in the BMW, you are pretty much on your own. They have sentinal mode, and it actually doesn’t suck like BMW’s drive recorder does. You can open your car with your phone, like for real via UWB, not just some NFC thing that works only in one place, or over the slow cellular unlock. I guess I didn’t explore the Spotify/music streaming experience.

I still chose the BMW because the better interior and build quality, but it was definitely a sacrifice.

I have an i3, pre-carplay, and I like that the computer works well with just a jog wheel.

It has a navigate to charger feature that works reasonably well (though there are too many steps to “only show fast chargers”, and many stations are broken, though hopefully the tesla supercharger deal will fix that…)

Range estimates seem to be accurate, unlike Tesla’s high-balling.

Anyway, I’m hoping they can do at least that well moving forward.

The navigate to charger lotion in BMW maps is just too hard to bother with. It’s almost better tk just ask siri to navigate to a charger of some kind. The jog wheel is nice, but I get away with voice for most functions. I hope it improves over time, especially the random GPS bug that displaces you by 100 meters and makes navigation useless.

(I'm still mostly happy with my i4, but I knew what I was trading off)

I also own an i4 and I still prefer its navigation system to Google Maps or Tesla. Navigating to chargers works perfectly, and it notifies you in realtime if for some reason it gets occupied.

Yes, Tesla sentry mode is really good, but I really cannot live without a parking front and lateral cameras in the narrow streets of Europe. Specially without a working PDC system.

I’m very happy with my i4, best car I’ve ever owned. And much better that all my Tesla experiences.

I too appreciate my parking cameras given the tight parking situation I have here in urban Seattle. It is also sorely needed because the i4 is a huge compact while I was used to parking a smaller sub-compact.

BMW navigation system is not very good for my needs. Maybe it is just better suited to Europe? That would explain the German-accented English it uses :). Our charging networks are so few and so saturated here in the PNW that it probably wouldn't mean much anyways.

Google maps or waze are much better than the on board tesla maps. You need to pay to have traffic data on tesla, waze and Google maps gives you that for free.

You pay to have traffic visualization, but traffic data is part of the trip planning, and the navigator does reroute you on a faster road if it's available (the delta is configurable).

But it lacks good media apps for podcasts and audiobooks unfortunately.

How about Spotify?

Apple Podcasts is coming in the next (holiday) update in +- 2 weeks (seriously)...

Sounds great with apple podcasts!

My main issue with spotify is that the syncronization is not great (and there are no audiobooks, at least in my market).

For example, I am listening to a podcast at work during the morning. Then some hours later I get in the car to drive home and want to continue the podcast, but often spotify would not be up to date with the current listening position in the podcast and I have to manually try and find the right location.

I would rather not give Tesla access to data from my phone.

In those specific usecases that it implements.

Also navigation makes idiotic moves lately.

I do not own a Tesla, but I've seen videos that told me that you pretty much have to use it's in car navigation system, for good reason: it factors in your route to give you an accurate range estimate, otherwise the estimates can be (significantly) off. That's important given that even the best electric cars have shorter range than gas cars, and there are far fewer recharging options than there are refueling options.

It will also use knowledge about the destination to prep the car. Heading to a charger? It will prep the battery so that it’s at the optimal temperature for charging on arrival etc..

That said though, there are route planners that can give excellent range estimation (both for online and offline cars), by taking into account the terrain/temperature/etc, like ABetterRoutePlanner - ABRP

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