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Tesla - Home wifi required?
- Thread starter xcyber
- Start date
You don't need wifi but it appears they are no longer doing safety updates over LTE (which they did when I first bought my car in 2020.) With the quantity of Model Ys on the road these days, I suppose that makes sense.
So, without wifi you have three choices:
1. set up a hotspot on your phone and update using your mobile phone data plan. This is a bit dodgy if you have limited data in your plan because tesla will not tell you how large the download is. Most are well under 5GB but NAV updates can be quite a bit larger.
2. go some place that has wifi. We tried signing in at businesses like McDonald's and were unable to do so with the car (that may have changed but they needed me to confirm stuff in a browser and that wasn't working for me when we were trying that.) So we go to our local tesla Service Centre and sign onto the guest wifi which is available in the parking lot. One of my kids has wifi that reaches the end of his driveway so we would update there but he lives over a 1000 miles away so we've only done one update that way.
3. Just don't update and whenever you take your car into be serviced, the SC will update the car for you.
The bonus to not having one's car download updates automatically is that you don't accidentally install something you don't want. Since it takes me about 2 hours of deliberate time to update (20 - 30 minute drive to the SC, download and install as well while my car is not in its underground parking spot), I pick and choose and don't rush for the latest and greatest which most of the time isn't the greatest. I avoided 3 updates over Christmas with this strategy.
The downside is when you disengage FSDb, it asks you why and you record a voice note. Without daily access to wifi, those voice notes are not being uploaded to tesla along with all the other data about my driving.
It has been 3.5 years and I won't say no wifi is a impediment to owning a car. But if you want the latest software install the second it is available to your car and you enthusiastically want to provide feedback to tesla, your views may be different from mine.
So, without wifi you have three choices:
1. set up a hotspot on your phone and update using your mobile phone data plan. This is a bit dodgy if you have limited data in your plan because tesla will not tell you how large the download is. Most are well under 5GB but NAV updates can be quite a bit larger.
2. go some place that has wifi. We tried signing in at businesses like McDonald's and were unable to do so with the car (that may have changed but they needed me to confirm stuff in a browser and that wasn't working for me when we were trying that.) So we go to our local tesla Service Centre and sign onto the guest wifi which is available in the parking lot. One of my kids has wifi that reaches the end of his driveway so we would update there but he lives over a 1000 miles away so we've only done one update that way.
3. Just don't update and whenever you take your car into be serviced, the SC will update the car for you.
The bonus to not having one's car download updates automatically is that you don't accidentally install something you don't want. Since it takes me about 2 hours of deliberate time to update (20 - 30 minute drive to the SC, download and install as well while my car is not in its underground parking spot), I pick and choose and don't rush for the latest and greatest which most of the time isn't the greatest. I avoided 3 updates over Christmas with this strategy.
The downside is when you disengage FSDb, it asks you why and you record a voice note. Without daily access to wifi, those voice notes are not being uploaded to tesla along with all the other data about my driving.
It has been 3.5 years and I won't say no wifi is a impediment to owning a car. But if you want the latest software install the second it is available to your car and you enthusiastically want to provide feedback to tesla, your views may be different from mine.
Thanks for the detailed feedback. I have good wifi signal strength in the garage and even on the the driveway. Just wanted to know if it is a requirement for Tesla updates, which seems like it is.
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