Push Notifications for Large Scale Issues

[namlio]

With the recent large scale outages of Slacker and LTE, and all of the questions it raises in the forums, I got to thinking about how nice it would be if Tesla would push notifications to the app and/or the car telling us about the problem. If the Tesla help line was made aware of an issue, either by the provider, or by a significant number of calls form owners, they could push out a notification informing us all at the same time, rather than having to handle a large volume of calls on the same issue. Fewer calls to handle and better communication with the owners. Seems like a win-win to me. Is it really that hard?

 

[boaterva]

That would be a good idea; as some of us saw, even when their servers were in a dicey state, we were still getting notifications from (at least) the iOS app for charging, since it came from the Apple notification service.

Some sort of broadcast service for this sort of issue would be nice; goes along with the whole 'Tesla needs to improve comms' in everything, as we all well know.

I think they just need someone to prioritize things, and, again, Elon is wearing too many hats.

 

[whitex]

Unlikely to happen. Drawing attention to the outage translates to bad user experience. It is counter-intuitive to tech people (including me), but the general public just doesn't want to know - ignorance is bliss when it comes to issues like that. This is why for example when your phone is out of service area, you get a tiny icon at best rather than a popup notification.

 

[ahulett]

Start simple: a status page, or a Twitter feed. No/minimal engineering required, so able to stand up fairly quickly.

 

[boaterva]

Unlikely to happen. Drawing attention to the outage translates to bad user experience. It is counter-intuitive to tech people (including me), but the general public just doesn't want to know - ignorance is bliss when it comes to issues like that. This is why for example when your phone is out of service area, you get a tiny icon at best rather than a popup notification.

I was going to add this.... you are correct, it's a general corporate thing, that they don't want to advertise. And it's one of the things that sometimes I tell people in IT (as I am) when we're working on something broken. Only a few people know about it now, but if you tell them all via an alert, then they will all be aware, as opposed to only the ones trying to use it before. That argument loses force as time goes on, of course.

You are screwed either way, for not communicating, or for waking everyone up to the fact that it's broken.

 

[whitex]

Start simple: a status page, or a Twitter feed. No/minimal engineering required, so able to stand up fairly quickly.

It's not a matter of technical feasibility (heck, I worked for a company which put extra engineering resources to get rid of any indication of such failures and bury the status deep in the menus). Status they already have built into the app (Tesla can show custom messages, like "system is temporarily down"). No way they will do Twitter or any push notifications.

 

[David.85D]

Thinking the same, but didn’t expect Tesla to do it. I suggest TMC do something similar - a banner on the landing page or an opt in on the user settings to receive major outage/status updates by email or text, etc.

 

[whitex]

Thinking the same, but didn’t expect Tesla to do it. I suggest TMC do something similar - a banner on the landing page or an opt in on the user settings to receive major outage/status updates by email or text, etc.

Can't you already do that for yourself with services like teslafy or whatever other services that poll your car's status?