Tesla WiFi uses US bands not European ones!

[Jason71]

I just discovered this and have never seen it posted before so thought I would post it as a PSA.

I noticed today that the car was not connecting to my Wifi even though there should be a strong signal. in fact it was not even finding my Wifi even though neighbours routers were showing up and they are much further away
I checked my Wifi and found it had auto switched to band 13. On a hunch I did a bit of Googling and discovered that the car only supports the US bands of 1-11 not the European standard of 1-14. Most routers are set to auto switch to find the least congested band so every time your router switches to band 12-14 the car will lose connectivity.

The only fix for this is to go into your router settings turn off auto but then you risk getting stuck on a busy band which could affect other devices in your house.
I am actually able to change my router to US region which would fix the problem but looking at that it seems the US 5.0ghz wifi has bands in the US that are not used in Europe so looks like that could be a really bad idea since you could end up on a band that your european equipment will not recognise. I can't switch the 2.4 that the car used without also switching the 5.0 so that is probably a non starter.

Personally I don't care that much I don't need the car connected to Wifi all the time. if I need a software update I will temporarily switch to manual but definitely one to add to the Tesla WTF list.

 

[Adopado]

I had already been operating on this assumption funnily enough, though I was not specifically aware of how the car is setup for the european market. As I have a separate wifi access point for the car it has been set to a specific channel (11) and just on 2.4GHz. I'm in the fortunate position of not having any competing wifi signals adjacent to the property so no allowances are necessary in respect of channel choice. All has been well, aside from the fact that the car seems to want/need a much stronger signal than any of my other devices!

 

[Generator]

I found the same when I was trying to connect my car for the first time but thought nothing of it at the time, as I’d entirely forgotten about the US vs EU bands. I ended up using an old Apple Airport as a bridge and creating a dedicated WiFi channel just for the car.

 

[Jason71]

My Router is only 4 meter from the car on a direct line of sight with a very strong signal so don't need an extra router and not going to set one up just for this.

I figured that for those less techy than your good selves above this could be a real head scratcher. I am guessing at least a few people have probably been ready to throw their router or themselves out of a window due to this at some time in the past. It really is quite poor. Surely only Tesla would try to get away with this!

 

[rotor2k]

Auto is probably a bad idea unless you have pro Wi-Fi gear, and for 2.4GHz you should only be using channels 1, 6 and 11, so the fact that your router is auto choosing channel 13 is a sign that you should leave auto off. You can download a signal strength app for your laptop that will show you the channels and how many other Access Points are on each one, that’ll help you choose the best one. If your router is 4m from the car, then the car should be joining the 5GHz WiFi (I’ve yet to see mine join the 2.4).