AHA! There is a sorta kinda workaround to use the voice commands to navigate to a contact name. I knew I had found a way during my test drive before I bought my Model S, then forgot.
Here’s the deal, requiring a one-time setup for each contact that you wish to navigate to by voice command. The setup: as everyone else instructs, use the touchscreen phone contacts list to look up a name that includes an address, and use the touch screen to tell the car to navigate to that address. NOW cancel the navigation, click on navigation again, choose the most recent address you just navigated to, and hit the little heart to add to favorites. In the popup for favorites, it shows the address for a title; replace that with the contact name.
Now you will be able to navigate to that contact name by voice command, because it is in the favorites by that name.
Caveat: of course the voice recognition will have problems with some names, so you might need to spell it phonetically in the favorites list to get it right. You can’t even edit the name you gave a favorite, you have to delete it and re-add it. It can get frustrating and a bit humorous, but it does work.
At the very minimum, Tesla software should put the contact name in the recent navigation list automatically. But they really should have a “Navigate on contact XXX”. I am thinking that the use of the extra “contact” word would help avoid pulling up too many choices when you are really looking for something in google maps, and don’t want it to be confused by a contact list that is as hopelessly out of date and huge as mine.