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

Subscribe to Podcast - This American Life

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.

swaltner

Active Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,901
2,252
Kansas, USA
i don’t particularly care for the Bluetooth integration on the Model 3 with my iPhone. Most of the audio that I’m trying to play from the phone is podcasts. So, I decided to try and flip podcast subscriptions from the iOS app to the Model 3 entertainment system directly. I’ve successfully subscribed/favorited to most of my podcasts, however, I can’t find This American Life.

When I select TuneIn and then search for “This American Life” or variants of that, the closest I can get is the “This American Life 24/7” radio station. This isn’t what I’m after though, because I want to play the latest episode, not the one they happen to be playing.

Any suggestions on how to find/favorite this podcast?
 
I ended up and gave up on this. Switched back to the Podcasts app on iOS 11 (soon to be iOS 12) streamed via Bluetooth to the car. In addition to the built-in Tesla on-screen app not finding all the podcasts that I wanted, it also had two glaring usability issues.

  • Frequently would lose your place in a podcast when you would get out of the car for an hour or more. More than half the time when I was listening to a podcast on the way to work, when I left for home at the end of the day, it would start at the beginning of the podcast episode. I’d have to spend time scrubbing around in the episode to find where I left off.
  • In addition, the user interface doesn’t keep track of the podcast episodes that you have already listened to. I was needing to remember which episodes I had already listened to instead of just browsing a “new episodes” section. To find a new podcast episode, I had to individually search all the podcasts that I favorited instead of looking in a single location.
Oh well, it was fun to try the Tesla TuneIn interface out for a month. I’ll give it another shot when the 9.x firmware is released in a month (or more), but don’t really have much hope that Tesla will make changes here. Podcasts are somewhere that Apple CarPlay really shines and is one place that I really miss CarPlay with the Tesla.
 
  • Like
Reactions: srjinatl