I've now played with V8 for a few hours and here is what I found. Overall, there were some improvements--a change from V7 where there were only two improvements (garage door opening and the trip graph on the energy screen) with everything else being a very large downgrade. In V8 there are many improvements but also far too many items that are not as good as they used to be from a safety or usability standpoint. If I recall the version numbers correctly, 5.2 (the second upgrade I received) has been the best version so far. Every version since has reduced usability and/or safety in one way or another.
I've grouped the comments together by topic.
Climate:
Bad: High temperature is now 27 rather than 31.5. This is bad because in Texas, where it gets hot, it causes the A/C to run very hard and waste energy. With the previous version, the high of 31.5 allowed for a gradual cool down without the excessive power use, noise, and vibration.
No change, but annoying: The fan icon does not indicate fan speed.
No change, but annoying: The tab only shows Auto or Custom, rather than the settings.
Navigation:
Good: Toll roads can be avoided. Thanks!!
Bad: No Supercharger list for easy navigation on trips. I use that feature all the time on trips.
Bad: When setting a destination, none of the Service Centres show except the one(s) on the route. So basically you have to cancel the trip to see what your options are, which will mess up the trip graph. This is one of the many items where the person who designed this should be reassigned to a job more suited to their talents.
Bad: The light and dark Supercharger icons, giving a view of which are reachable, was very handy. Not the end of the world that it's gone, but it shows that user convenience isn't even thought of when designing.
No change, but unsafe: The arrows on the turn-by-turn direction indicator don't show what the lane actually does the way it used to before V7. This means you can't plan ahead and may make unsafe lane changes when you find out what the lane really does. This would be useable (albeit ugly) if the arrows showed what the lanes actually were for (u-turn, left turn, left or straight, straight, straight or right, right turn).
Media: (Note: I only use USB so comments are all about how USB works. I have no idea why anyone would use lossy and expensive streaming music)
Good: favourites now shuffle and don't stop at the last song. Thank you.
Good: Time bar is now back on all songs. Thank you.
WTF: All the album art that was shown prior to V8 is now gone. All the album art that was missing prior to V8 is now back. I don't know how the programmers accomplished this, but it would have been better if they made it work correctly.
Bad: About one out of ten songs plays about 3/4 of the song and then resets to the beginning of the song. Never happened before V8.
Bad: The alphabetical scroll bar is gone. It's very hard to find an individual song or album (85% of my songs were all just grouped together because there was no Unicode tabs, so it's not as bad for me as it is for others that have only/mostly ASCII characters in the song/album titles).
Bad: The albums are especially annoying because when the Favourites are all lost (as happened during this version change) the normal
way to get them back was to play through all the songs and select Favourite or skip while listening (easy to do). Since there is now only Favourites and Recents, all the songs can't be played through--or at least it's not obvious how to do so--so you have to go to each album and select as a separate time-wasting task. After leaving an album, the display then jumps back to the top so you have scroll down. It should go back to where you were when you entered a particular album. I have about seventy albums but some have far more. It must be very frustrating for them as it's bad enough for me.
Bad: There are Favourite and Recent buttons, but they apparently do nothing. That is, selecting either button doesn't appear to change anything but the highlighting. The songs play the same way using either selection. Why isn't there an All button?
Bad: The heart icon is not even remotely clear as to whether empty or full indicates it's selected. Pressing on the Favourite or Recent button plays the song whether or not it's selected. It used to be obvious which was which. Interfaces need to be intuitive.
Bad: When going in to the Favourite selection, it doesn't stay after a charging session. Things should stay where you set them. Another example of zero user input and no testing.
Bad: The shuffle and replay selections aren't saved after a charge. They must be reselected each time.
Bad: The screen defaults to the phone selection. Probably the worst possible default as the phone selection is something that's rarely used once the car is set up. It should be where it was last used.
User Interface:
Good: Trip meters are back where they belong. Thank you.
Good: The three useless icons are gone.
Good: It's now possible to read the date on the Calendar icon. Thanks!
Bad: The behaviour of top buttons has changed making multiple presses necessary. This horrible new behaviour means your eyes are off the road much longer. Doesn't anyone think safety at Tesla? Car interfaces are not iPhone interfaces where you can take your time to figure out what's what. A car interface needs to be clear, quick, and intuitive. I, and probably many others, always keep the rear camera at the top so that there is less head movement to see the camera (which is used more often than the rear view mirror as it shows more). In V8 the Nav defaults to the top, erasing the camera unless you hold and drag. This is much less safe than the previous behaviour where if you chose something else it would go to the top screen and you just pressed the camera icon to get it back. The Nav was left alone the bottom half of the screen. At the very least this behaviour should be user selectable for safety.
No change, but annoying: Passengers still can't see the temperature. I know, I know, but they ask what the temperature is frequently. They used to be able to see it and didn't have to ask. It's not as if there is a shortage of room.
No change, but annoying: No day name is displayed. (There appears to be plenty of room to have it back the way it used to be.)
No change, but annoying: The turn indicators are way too small and located in a position where they are easy to miss. It was sooo much better before someone decided to copy Johnny Ive's user unfriendly interface.
No change, but annoying: The useless odometer is given centre position rather than the battery display.
No change, but annoying: The useless toy car is still there with it's too-small-to-see red lights and too bright car.
No change, but unsafe: The low contrast, flat layout is still very hard to read in bright light without study.
No change, but unsafe: The Google maps fonts are just way too small. These things need to be able to be read at a glance.
No change, but unsafe: The night display of the Google maps is unreadable.
No change, but unsafe: The kW numbers are very hard to read in bright light (because of the horrible low contrast flat display).
Miscellaneous:
No change, but unsafe: The extra time to press the wiper or turn signal levers/buttons before they operate means that they still don't always flash/wipe when you need them to. Even after 75K miles of driving this still happens. It's very unsafe when you can't count on the wipers to wipe every time.
No change, but annoying: The automatic display light level is not as good as it used to be before it was automated. It doesn't start off where it was left, but instead seems to take the time of day as a starting point. This means that if you park in a dimly lit parking garage, and it is daytime, it starts off very bright. The algorithm was perfect before automation.
