Tesla navigation map is now in grey scale - how do we change this?

[Larry]

Question

Am I the only one whose car maps barely work with the new grey maps?

I have a sea of grey, with no traffic info

I have to pinch and Unpinch and finally traffic info might display
And often I get grey tiles with no map at all...

It’s like the maps won’t load... or load super slowly

Is it just my car?

Argh

Me as well. It’s really pissing me off

 

[ABC2D]

Tesla navigation map is now in grey scale - how do we change this?

 

[JD01]

Me as well. It’s really pissing me off

Before they pushed the update, I found toggling satellite view on and off made it start working again.

If you're having the same issue as I was having, they'll be able to see it in your logs and push 2018.16 to you early.

Edit: That was supposed to be 2018.26... Sorry!

 

[Larry]

Before they pushed the update, I found toggling satellite view on and off made it start working again.

If you're having the same issue as I was having, they'll be able to see it in your logs and push 2018.16 to you early.

Edit: That was supposed to be 2018.26... Sorry!

I rebooted my screen and it worked after that perfectly

 

[##JP]

Me as well. It’s really pissing me off

The grey tiles appearing instead of a map is a bug. I saw it in 24.1 and when I complained about it they pushed 26 to me. Will know in a few days if that fixed it.

 

[JRMW]

Thanks all.

I’ll reboot tomorrow and go to the SC if that fails.

Sad to have an ugly, boring, hard to read, and useless map.

Hopefully Tesla will allow people to choose color again on a future upgrade

 

[Gwgan]

New daytime map has all the same location markers that the nightime map has had for a while.
It updates faster on 3G.

 

[Logan5]

Having used the new grey maps for a week or so... I've formed my opinion.

I miss the blue water, and green parks. Call me 1980's .. but:

Color ADDS information for quick visual identification.

Making everything grey HIDES information.

It's really that simple.

Quiz: which word in the grey sentence is darkest?

Test: now find the red word on this page.

It is now harder to identify things on the map, and has created a bigger driver-distraction when trying to do so. This is a fact and a failure.

Also, roads being white on a too-light grey background in the
daytime makes it hard to use as a driving navigation tool while
roaming around (no destination selected that gives you a blue route).
One really has to concentrate more time now looking at the nav
screen to get value from it... opposite of what good driver
ergonomics suggest.

If roads were BLACK lines (or dark grey) instead of white on the light grey palette background that'd be better.

Two things I do like about the new nav:
- it handles pinch and rotate faster on my MCU1 generation car
- the labels on some things keep oriented in a readable way as the map rotates

But the loss of color combined with white roads on light grey background was a complete miss Tesla. Boo!

I came this thread to post essentially what you've typed scottm, although what I was considering was a lot less elegant and laced with profanity.

As you point out, screen aesthetics aside (which I personally dislike in the gray scale), the color on the map contained information. Some of this information could be captured out of the corner of the eye or with a quick glance. The gray scale requires more attention to decipher, attention that is being diverted away from the road.

Going to gray scale was a bad decision. It looks bad, contains less information, and is ironically a bigger distraction than the colored maps because it requires more attention.

Elon, if you're reading this please have your team restore the color or provide an option for doing so.

Thanks!

 

[brkaus]

Having used the new grey maps for a week or so... I've formed my opinion.

I miss the blue water, and green parks. Call me 1980's .. but:

Color ADDS information for quick visual identification.

Making everything grey HIDES information.

It's really that simple.

Quiz: which word in the grey sentence is darkest?

Test: now find the red word on this page.

It is now harder to identify things on the map, and has created a bigger driver-distraction when trying to do so. This is a fact and a failure.

Also, roads being white on a too-light grey background in the
daytime makes it hard to use as a driving navigation tool while
roaming around (no destination selected that gives you a blue route).
One really has to concentrate more time now looking at the nav
screen to get value from it... opposite of what good driver
ergonomics suggest.

If roads were BLACK lines (or dark grey) instead of white on the light grey palette background that'd be better.

Two things I do like about the new nav:
- it handles pinch and rotate faster on my MCU1 generation car
- the labels on some things keep oriented in a readable way as the map rotates

But the loss of color combined with white roads on light grey background was a complete miss Tesla. Boo!

Sorry, I am unable to identify the red word in your text. I am pretty much fully colorblind.

 

[brkaus]

The grey tiles appearing instead of a map is a bug. I saw it in 24.1 and when I complained about it they pushed 26 to me. Will know in a few days if that fixed it.

Like a good tesla driver, I hit the voice button and filed a bug report on this issue.

I said "report - center screen not updating, map tiles missing".

It put on the IC screen "report - center screen not updating, may be kissing".... "thank you for your report"

 

[dna4life]

I just clicked on the the globe icon while map is displayed. That enable color and also click the two cars icon that will put traffic in color also..

 

[Impala1ss]

The grey maps suck. They are harder to see and even on the bigger streets the names have disappeared. I missed a turn today because the main street I was supposed to turn on was not labeled. I guess I can live with the grey maps but the missing street names suck.

 

[js2082]

The new map sucks big, not only for the gray color, also it seems a lot other issues such as the wrong traffic display, and sometimes it just stuck and I can't switch to satellite map. I have to reboot the screen every few days. Before this update, I almost never need to reboot the screen. Also, the night mode is even worse, very difficult to recognize road name from the gray letters on gray map. I almost missed the road the other day, which makes the night driving dangerous. Whoever manages software there is an idiot.

 

[AmpedRealtor]

I quite like the grayscale

 

[David29]

The grey maps suck. They are harder to see and even on the bigger streets the names have disappeared. I missed a turn today because the main street I was supposed to turn on was not labeled. I guess I can live with the grey maps but the missing street names suck.

I finally got the newest version of the maps today, in release 2018.26.2. What bothers me the most is the tiny, unreadable gray text. What is this fascination that Tesla seems to have with making the displayed text so faint that it is unreadable? This is a large part of what changed with version 8 -- the fonts got smaller and lighter in color to the point that much of the text on the instrument cluster is unreadable. I suspect someone is using some font that they think is "fashionable" or "subtle" or some such nonsense, and forgetting about actual usability!
They no doubt do their design mockups on some huge monitor where they can read it just fine and think anyone that can't is just an old fart who should not be driving or something.
Can't help but wonder if the SAE or some similar group has standards for this, and whether or not Tesla tries to follow them, and whether they meet them....
Sorry for the rant, this sort of thing (subtle, pretty, fashionable instead if usable) makes me a bit crazy.

 

[f-stop]

I finally got the newest version of the maps today, in release 2018.26.2. What bothers me the most is the tiny, unreadable gray text. What is this fascination that Tesla seems to have with making the displayed text so faint that it is unreadable? This is a large part of what changed with version 8 -- the fonts got smaller and lighter in color to the point that much of the text on the instrument cluster is unreadable. I suspect someone is using some font that they think is "fashionable" or "subtle" or some such nonsense, and forgetting about actual usability!
They no doubt do their design mockups on some huge monitor where they can read it just fine and think anyone that can't is just an old fart who should not be driving or something.
Can't help but wonder if the SAE or some similar group has standards for this, and whether or not Tesla tries to follow them, and whether they meet them....
Sorry for the rant, this sort of thing (subtle, pretty, fashionable instead if usable) makes me a bit crazy.

short of just firing it up briefly to see what the new Nav looks like, since I got the new version I haven't used it to actually plot a course somewhere while driving so I can't say if I like the new look or not, yet.

however I totally agree with your general point about the increasing use of low-contrast fonts and colours - it's a general issue which I've noticed over the past quite-a-few years now - on the web, in GUIs for computers, smartphones, TV set top boxes, etc etc.

Somewhere along the way it became a fashionable design trend to reduce the contrast between text and background, at the unfortunate expense of readability. Pretty sure most of these UI designers still have young eyes and big screen monitors when they're admiring their light gray or light blue fonts on medium gray backgrounds. If they could only see what these things look like when your eyes age 2 or 3 decades...

There needs a bit of return to Design for Usability over design for design's-sake - especially in the case of a car where safety may be an issue. UI designers today could use some re-education on this matter, IMO. It should be mandatory that all UI designers consult a contrast checker tool AND have someone with older eyes than theirs to review their UI design under various lighting conditions. Or at the very least, perhaps provide some configurability of font size/contrast to the end user (the iPhone's very useful text display and Accessibility settings come to mind)

Bring back good ol' fashioned high contrast text!
Low-Contrast Text Is Not the Answer

 

[RDoc]

The problem with all the UI issues as I see it, is that Tesla really sucks at software and has a totally captive audience.

 

[tpedwards]

On the contrary. I think Tesla is great at software. However, their engineers are great at software, but don’t appreciate UI designers who are trained in usability. I wrote some awesome software back in the day, solved some problems. It was not for wide use (thank goodness) because I could not design an interface for a general audience.

Tesla needs to hire some UI designers who are not just graphic designers who can make things look trendy. And they shouldn’t leave it to back room engineers either.

 

[Dan Baldwin]

So, does any know the REAL reason Tesla went with the grey maps ?

 

[jlv1]

So, does any know the REAL reason Tesla went with the grey maps ?

Color maps now cost $1000 more?