Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

3G support in AU

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Depends if it's incorporated in the main board of the MCU.

Without connection on the road, the MCU1 cars would have to do updates on wifi at home, and cache up any map data for trips over wifi at home before setting out. And be glad they still have a radio, as the tunein/spotify would go dark. They'll pry that radio from my cold, dead hands...

Thinking about it a bit out of the box, what would it take for some phone app to be written to make a 3G hotspot for the car to connect to? Assuming the phone was capable of 3G, that is.
 
Thinking about it a bit out of the box, what would it take for some phone app to be written to make a 3G hotspot for the car to connect to? Assuming the phone was capable of 3G, that is.
Wouldn't you just make the phone a WiFi hotspot? Or would that be too annoying to manually connect to it every time you engaged Drive?
 
Thinking about it a bit out of the box, what would it take for some phone app to be written to make a 3G hotspot for the car to connect to?

Phones are not capable of acting as mobile base stations (and they are not licensed to do so either).

A workable alternative would be a software update for the Tesla to keep wifi on while driving on the cars that have only 3G modems.
 
I tried this last night after I noticed the 3G dropped out for a few hundred meters in the tunnel under Woolloomooloo.
If you connect to your phone Wi-Fi when parked, it disconnects as soon as you put it in drive. You have to tap the 3G symbol on the MCU and search for your phone hot spot again and then it will stay connected to the hot spot whilst you drive. As soon as you put it in park it goes back to 3G.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Techno-phile
What happens with older cars that are 3G only, when Telstra decommissions 3G in 2024?
This is not a Tesla story, but... we bought our Nissan LEAF in 2014, and its Telematics system was 2G and ran on Telstra. Telstra closed 2G in December 2016, as a result, the LEAF Telematics went off the air. Nissan arranged for warranty replacement of the TCU to a 3G version, but it took them a few months for them to get around to it.

Whether they will do this again for free when 3G closes (and whether they will even make a 4G TCU for a 2012 LEAF) is another matter.
 
  • Like
Reactions: pts260
This is not a Tesla story, but... we bought our Nissan LEAF in 2014, and its Telematics system was 2G and ran on Telstra. Telstra closed 2G in December 2016, as a result, the LEAF Telematics went off the air. Nissan arranged for warranty replacement of the TCU to a 3G version, but it took them a few months for them to get around to it.

Whether they will do this again for free when 3G closes (and whether they will even make a 4G TCU for a 2012 LEAF) is another matter.
Nissan have decomissioned carwings in the last few months. Leaf telematics are dead.

I think Tesla offers a 4G modem upgrade independent of a full MCU upgrade in the US, but I'm not sure if it's offered locally other than doing the upgrade to MCU2
 
Nissan have decomissioned carwings in the last few months. Leaf telematics are dead.
Carwings was dead for a month or so, but I got on Nissan’s case and they brought it back online in January (although it still doesn’t work properly). It’s possible they didn’t even know it was offline - they don’t seem to invest much time and effort into keeping it running. Login to Carwings is possible again, trip stats can be downloaded again, but the realtime operational stuff (reporting battery charge, remote starting of AC or charging) still doesn’t work. It’s always been flaky at best.

The Tesla App is like drinking champagne in comparison.