Model S Software/Firmware wishlist

[IV Leaguer]

I would like to have more than three flashes when the lane change lever is touched. A selectable number of flashes would be great but if fixed, 7 flashes (like I have on my Lexus) would be better than the present 3.

Also, I don't know if there is a bug or my fault, but the headrest position on the passenger seat won't stick. It reverts to the highest position.

 

[HankLloydRight]

I would like an ever increasing volume when you leave the blinkers on too long. The Tesla blinker sound is pretty soft, and I've left them on unintentionally a few times. Either that, or the blinker icon gets increasingly larger and larger on the IC until you realize you're a doof and left it on too long. Or both.

 

[scottm]

I thought of one today... as weather turns colder.

It would be nice, on the cold weather control panel page on the center console... (a page for those of us who have the cold weather package and/or heated seats) to make the mirrors on the picture touchable, so if you poke a mirror the heated mirror feature comes on and shows glowing red. Just like poking a seat activates the heated seat.

Currently, to get the mirror heat to come on, you have to press the "rear defrost icon" on the HVAC bar that stays at the bottom of the console at all times. If you do press the rear defrost, the 'cold weather page' does show the mirrors as glowing red.

So why not allow touching the mirrors on that page? seems obvious to me... AND this would allow "unbundling" of battery consumption for rear defroster and heated mirrors for what you need the most (hint: mirrors). Everyone knows that rear defroster is a battery consumption pig.

 

[scottm]

I would like to have more than three flashes when the lane change lever is touched. A selectable number of flashes would be great but if fixed, 7 flashes (like I have on my Lexus) would be better than the present 3.

Something like this... would be nice. But Tesla could do it all in software... as there is no aftermarket flasher module option for the car.

 

[Rusty1]

I am still waiting on a camp mode that keeps the radio and HVAC on all night while I am charging.

 

[scottm]

I am still waiting on a camp mode that keeps the radio and HVAC on all night while I am charging.

Temporary work-around: there's an App for that. Has camp mode, which as I understand it, will do a wake up ping and fiddles the HVAC temp every twenty minutes or whatever... to keep you cozy when doors are remaining closed for the night.
Search around a bit and you'll come across it.

Only problem with these non-Tesla apps is that you have to give up your credentials to something ... that you must trust.
I don't trust hence never use aftermarket Apps for the car...

So the ask is very valid: TESLA please make this feature. We trust you and only you with keys for the car.

 

[IV Leaguer]

How about a real Lane Departure Warning. The very subtle steering wheel vibration is barely noticeable to me. There should be a real effect - stronger vibration, perhaps with a tunable intensity or an audible - that can alert me if I happen e.g., to be dozing off, and drifting across the lane markings.

 

[Cooker]

but it must have decent bitrate else it is all but unlistenable - please Tesla

If you have a premium Spotify account, does the native app use higher bitrate (through Spotify Connect)?

 

[Gig103]

I'd like to see the mirrors go back to only unfolding when a door is opened!!!
(Reference: Notable change in 17.34 (folding mirror routines))

And if they aren't going to fix the artwork to be correct, I'd like the ability to turn it off. A radio station I listen to, in the evening, becomes "RadioDisney" until I scrollwheel reboot, then it's fine for a few days then goes back. It is definitely not Radio Disney.

 

[HankLloydRight]

And if they aren't going to fix the artwork to be correct, I'd like the ability to turn it off. A radio station I listen to, in the evening, becomes "RadioDisney" until I scrollwheel reboot, then it's fine for a few days then goes back. It is definitely not Radio Disney.

If the media played selected album or station art entirely at random, it probably would have a better success rate. I rarely see it choose anything close to what's playing.

 

[iffatall]

If the media played selected album or station art entirely at random, it probably would have a better success rate. I rarely see it choose anything close to what's playing.

I assume you are talking about radio stations. The player correctly displays the artwork embedded in the file that is played locally. Granted there is some confusion about formats etc, but with the right format, it is fine.
For stations, is the artwork streamed from the source? I don't know how it works.

 

[HankLloydRight]

I'm talking about USB folders without artwork. Or radio stations. It never seems to me to show the proper album art regardless of what I'm listening to.

 

[iffatall]

I'm talking about USB folders without artwork. Or radio stations. It never seems to me to show the proper album art regardless of what I'm listening to.

Oh, I was not aware that the media player is still fetching artowrk from the web when it's missing from the USB track file.

 

[beeeerock]

Still waiting for the ability to tweak the subwoofer settings... crossover frequency and gain would be nice... cheap aftermarket decks have done it for years...

And it would be great to get What3Words integration with the Nav. Mercedes is advertising it for next year, with voice activation. With the ability to tie that to charge locations and one day Plugshare, it would be valuable.

 

[BertL]

I'm talking about USB folders without artwork. Or radio stations. It never seems to me to show the proper album art regardless of what I'm listening to.

Hank, I believe the issue related to proper album art is entirely dependent upon accuracy of the tagging in your physical USB track and how well that then matches to whatever semi-crowd-sourced WWW site Tesla is using -- generally Gracenotes or MusicBrainz from my various auto mfgr experience. My former Lexus, MBZ, and BMW that did the lookup, also showed the oddest art from time-to-time from radio, SiriusXM, and even my own tracks that didn't at the time have their own imbedded art. IMHO there isn't a lot that the auto mfgr itself can do to improve the art you see.

There is nothing you (or Tesla) can do about radio station lookups. You can try to improve your USB situation by perhaps changing track tagging, but that is really a shot in the dark since you don't know what will work via the WWW art sources Tesla is being used. As suggested though, adding physical album art to your USB tracks became the best choice a number of months ago when Tesla started supporting it, that will work most** of the time. I suggest from my own testing you add "front cover" album art as JPG and only 300x300 pixels to maximize compatibility and minimize limited CID memory usage. The size can be larger (I've tested up through 1500x1500), but we don't know what that really does with other MP memory constraint issues I've discussed ad-infinatum in the Comprehensive USB Bugs thread.

** Compounding this on our MS for the last several months is the additional challenge whereby MP tends to cache album art even across CID reboots. So, just beware that if you remove your USB device and only add album art to a track without changing anything else, MP may still display the original art (the downloaded one in your case) until some uncontrollable-by-the-user magic happens inside MP... i.e. there are no guarantees how or when to get the new art to now display unless you change the directory structure and/or file naming associated with the changed tracks to trick the USB rescan process to look inside your track and pull out any new tag data including artwork.​

 

[Silenus136]

I would like to see Reverse disabled if rear hatch is open, with an alert on touch-screen requiring driver to confirm they want to drive in reverse despite hatch being open before the car will move. Yes, I hit the garage door with the hatch open...

 

[Merrill]

Hank, I believe the issue related to proper album art is entirely dependent upon accuracy of the tagging in your physical USB track and how well that then matches to whatever semi-crowd-sourced WWW site Tesla is using -- generally Gracenotes or MusicBrainz from my various auto mfgr experience. My former Lexus, MBZ, and BMW that did the lookup, also showed the oddest art from time-to-time from radio, SiriusXM, and even my own tracks that didn't at the time have their own imbedded art. IMHO there isn't a lot that the auto mfgr itself can do to improve the art you see.

There is nothing you (or Tesla) can do about radio station lookups. You can try to improve your USB situation by perhaps changing track tagging, but that is really a shot in the dark since you don't know what will work via the WWW art sources Tesla is being used. As suggested though, adding physical album art to your USB tracks became the best choice a number of months ago when Tesla started supporting it, that will work most** of the time. I suggest from my own testing you add "front cover" album art as JPG and only 300x300 pixels to maximize compatibility and minimize limited CID memory usage. The size can be larger (I've tested up through 1500x1500), but we don't know what that really does with other MP memory constraint issues I've discussed ad-infinatum in the Comprehensive USB Bugs thread.

** Compounding this on our MS for the last several months is the additional challenge whereby MP tends to cache album art even across CID reboots. So, just beware that if you remove your USB device and only add album art to a track without changing anything else, MP may still display the original art (the downloaded one in your case) until some uncontrollable-by-the-user magic happens inside MP... i.e. there are no guarantees how or when to get the new art to now display unless you change the directory structure and/or file naming associated with the changed tracks to trick the USB rescan process to look inside your track and pull out any new tag data including artwork.​

Maybe you can tell me why some of my music has no album art and some does, I have used iTunes to download my music to the thumb drive and always checked include album art.

 

[BertL]

Maybe you can tell me why some of my music has no album art and some does, I have used iTunes to download my music to the thumb drive and always checked include album art.

We're a bit off subject for this thread, so may want to take more discussion into another thread, but to answer your question:

From a legacy perspective (before there was a standard), iTunes stored album art in an iTunes-accessible only subdirectory on your Mac or PC. For the last several years since the ID3 standard came into being, iTunes additionally supports art tagged within a track itself. So, within iTunes or iOS Music Player, it can look like your track has art when you play it, but if you copy (generally an older) physical file say out to a USB device, you may have a track without the art physically being imbedded inside of it.

What you have to do is run a tool to figure out which tracks don't have embedded album art, and then manually insert it as the front cover art using a tool of your choice. This DougScripts will make a list of tracks without embedded art. This DougScripts will allow you to point to a list of tracks (like those from the first script) and automate all the required manipulation exporting the track, embedding the art, and putting it back for you. I used the first script long ago to get my library cleaned-up, then manually did the tagging and art update myself, so don't have experience with the 2nd script I referenced. Other tools like Illustrate's PerfecTunes can find and put album art into your tracks, but if you do that outside of iTunes, you'll need to also cause iTunes to refresh itself to use the new album art and not potentially that old imbedded version -- there are scripts and methods for that, or you can manually just play and stop each track within iTunes, and that will trigger it to reread the source track contents and pick up the new imbedded album art.

BEWARE that if you are changing album art yourself using a tag editor, the ID3 standard allows for multiples of many different types of album art to be associated with a single track -- iTunes lets you have multiple front covers as well. From my testing, Tesla MP only acts on the first "front cover" album art for each track. So, if you use a tag editor trying to fix this manually, the first "Front Cover Album Artwork" is the one you care most about.

Good luck.

 

[Cooker]

I would like to see Reverse disabled if rear hatch is open, with an alert on touch-screen requiring driver to confirm they want to drive in reverse despite hatch being open before the car will move. Yes, I hit the garage door with the hatch open...

Your last line made me smile. Good that something positive came out of it. Hope damage minimal

 

[Bebop]

I am still waiting on a camp mode that keeps the radio and HVAC on all night while I am charging.

A update just happened for Camper Mode!