Vote on software features/bugs to fix in 7.1 and beyond

[Andyw2100]

Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere or not (probably has, but I couldn't find it)... but it shows some interesting features that were considered in the design process... maybe some are still under development, or they've been killed. Interesting watch either way, although it takes about 10 minutes to get more meaty.

It had been posted in the Video subforum here: Video about Model S touch screen user interface design

I imagine people interested in this thread appreciate seeing it here, though!

 

[solaris007]

that's a great video, thanks for posting.

 

[chrisdken]

Anyone else having their cell/data connection drop out? Everyday I have to reboot the center console touchscreen because my data stops responding. Cannot surf the browser, cannot download maps, cannot use the voice control until I reboot and I have to reboot almost every 24 hours now. I have the 3g cell in my 2015 85D. Very annoying, it's become some much more flaky since 7.1.

 

[davidc18]

Anyone else having their cell/data connection drop out? Everyday I have to reboot the center console touchscreen because my data stops responding. Cannot surf the browser, cannot download maps, cannot use the voice control until I reboot and I have to reboot almost every 24 hours now. I have the 3g cell in my 2015 85D. Very annoying, it's become some much more flaky since 7.1.

Yes, having some issues here as well.

 

[supratachophobia]

Hey cool, time to resurrect this thread. Can we start going through the feature list and knock out the ones that were included in 7.1 so we can vote on a second round of suggestions?

 

[BertL]

Hey cool, time to resurrect this thread. Can we start going through the feature list and knock out the ones that were included in 7.1 so we can vote on a second round of suggestions?

I'm all for fun projects, but is there any indication Tesla actually USED some of the hard work Korben, you, and nearly 300 other people provided? With what I've seen so far, parallels in 7.1 deliverables seem coincidental -- not because of our effort, and include as many tangents with new unexpected things away from what we were suggesting as being the most important, as anything.

Sorry to come across as a bit of a downer, but am concerned the previous effort did not gain an ear of Tesla (and as importantly, Elon) where a next iteration will make any difference what so ever. Your thoughts?

 

[Korben]

I'm all for fun projects, but is there any indication Tesla actually USED some of the hard work Korben, you, and nearly 300 other people provided? With what I've seen so far, parallels in 7.1 deliverables seem coincidental -- not because of our effort, and include as many tangents with new unexpected things away from what we were suggesting as being the most important, as anything.

Sorry to come across as a bit of a downer, but am concerned the previous effort did not gain an ear of Tesla (and as importantly, Elon) where a next iteration will make any difference what so ever. Your thoughts?

Totally get where you are coming from BertL. This seems like it is falling on deaf ears and there is a distinct possibility it is.

I don't want to make excuses for Tesla but I do think it is important to acknowledge that the development process can be quite lengthy. We gave our collected feedback very late in the process for 7.1. In fact, we gave them our last update on the 5th of December right before the holiday break. They delivered the SW update on the 13th of Jan! It will be most interesting to watch for the next update and see if the desires of the community are addressed more substantially. There were some very minor tweaks that seem to indicate someone is listening (or at least someone is actually connected to sub-systems we are interested in updating).

FWIW, it seems obvious that Tesla will not acknowledge feedback specifically. That said, were I product manager or engineering leader for Tesla I would look at the input to get a sense of focus areas. Many of our requests were not very well thought out so it is likely a bit of a struggle to consume them. I want to be clear that I am one of the ones with poorly expressed ideas. Some of our requests appeared to be quite difficult to implement as well.

It is important to reiterate that all developers are not fungible. Getting wrapped around the axle (pun not intended but I got a chuckle out of that) about why their autopilot engineers do not fix the media player to our liking is not very useful. Bringing in a large group of new developers takes time. Writing and building code thoughtfully for the future takes time. It seems quite clear that they are not staffed for rapid and wholesale updates to the entire code base. You may, or may not, be shocked to find out that the traditional development process is incredibly lengthy (18 months is the norm for traditional product development). We can hope, and I believe, that Tesla is more advanced than that. But, even so, building a solid infrastructure that will play out well for the future requires a lot more work than most think.

Thinking through the above indicates that waiting for the next minor release to see if we have had some impact is probably the best strategy. Post the next minor release it would be good to redo the feature/fix priorities and see whether we have something substantially new/important to ask for.

 

[Whitmarsh]

Anyone else having their cell/data connection drop out? Everyday I have to reboot the center console touchscreen because my data stops responding. Cannot surf the browser, cannot download maps, cannot use the voice control until I reboot and I have to reboot almost every 24 hours now. I have the 3g cell in my 2015 85D. Very annoying, it's become some much more flaky since 7.1.

Yes, same here. When I rebooted, it showed 2 bars of 3G but only for a few seconds. Will talk to SC.

 

[BertL]

Totally get where you are coming from BertL. This seems like it is falling on deaf ears and there is a distinct possibility it is.

I don't want to make excuses for Tesla but I do think it is important to acknowledge that the development process can be quite lengthy. We gave our collected feedback very late in the process for 7.1. In fact, we gave them our last update on the 5th of December right before the holiday break. They delivered the SW update on the 13th of Jan! It will be most interesting to watch for the next update and see if the desires of the community are addressed more substantially. There were some very minor tweaks that seem to indicate someone is listening (or at least someone is actually connected to sub-systems we are interested in updating).

FWIW, it seems obvious that Tesla will not acknowledge feedback specifically. That said, were I product manager or engineering leader for Tesla I would look at the input to get a sense of focus areas. Many of our requests were not very well thought out so it is likely a bit of a struggle to consume them. I want to be clear that I am one of the ones with poorly expressed ideas. Some of our requests appeared to be quite difficult to implement as well.

It is important to reiterate that all developers are not fungible. Getting wrapped around the axle (pun not intended but I got a chuckle out of that) about why their autopilot engineers do not fix the media player to our liking is not very useful. Bringing in a large group of new developers takes time. Writing and building code thoughtfully for the future takes time. It seems quite clear that they are not staffed for rapid and wholesale updates to the entire code base. You may, or may not, be shocked to find out that the traditional development process is incredibly lengthy (18 months is the norm for traditional product development). We can hope, and I believe, that Tesla is more advanced than that. But, even so, building a solid infrastructure that will play out well for the future requires a lot more work than most think.

Thinking through the above indicates that waiting for the next minor release to see if we have had some impact is probably the best strategy. Post the next minor release it would be good to redo the feature/fix priorities and see whether we have something substantially new/important to ask for.

Agreed. IMHO, it's just too early to do another iteration.

I've been a part of, and was the guy funding several multi-year development cycles more than once in my career, so appreciate the challenges involved protecting the vision and keeping the team on-task WHILE taking care of and growing the daily business. Like some other MS owners, every time Tesla delivers a new software release with new features, I'm excited, but I also become more impatient having to deal with Tesla's acknowledged broken code that I regularly interact with in my MS, and missing basic (software) capabilities I took for granted in my previous vehicles -- but there is a whole other thread on that so we don't need to go off topic here again.

 

[kirkbauer]

As an executive in a software development shop I agree it is too early to do another round and also too early to know if our feedback had any effect. I would expect it to take 9-18 months for our feedback to have an effect if it does.

 

[msnow]

Who from Tesla received our first iteration?

 

[Korben]

Who from Tesla received our first iteration?

Supratachophobia had some contacts he was exercising. Not sure where he is at with that. Personally, I am not too worried about establishing explicit contact nor have I spent any time worrying about it. If we keep thoughtfully building up features/bugs that are important to the community I trust enlightened self interest will prevail. The key is persistence and quality :smile:.

 

[msnow]

Supratachophobia had some contacts he was exercising. Not sure where he is at with that. Personally, I am not too worried about establishing explicit contact nor have I spent any time worrying about it. If we keep thoughtfully building up features/bugs that are important to the community I trust enlightened self interest will prevail. The key is persistence and quality :smile:.

Please don't take this the wrong way because I was an early adopter and supporter of your program and appreciate you early efforts but the "key" is to get RESULTS. Just generating more data (some of which is contradictory and inconsistent) isn't going to get us anywhere unless people like generating more data. Perhaps we will have to revert back to just tweeting and writing Elon himself. At least it's public that way and it seems that's his preferred method of communication.

 

[Korben]

Please don't take this the wrong way because I was an early adopter and supporter of your program and appreciate you early efforts but the "key" is to get RESULTS. Just generating more data (some of which is contradictory and inconsistent) isn't going to get us anywhere unless people like generating more data. Perhaps we will have to revert back to just tweeting and writing Elon himself. At least it's public that way and it seems that's his preferred method of communication.

No offense taken! Personally, I am just going to stay on my plodding methodical path for a while till I see some objective data that indicates success in a timeframe that I think is reasonable :smile:. Of course my idea of reasonable timeframe is a bit different than others. I believe there are decent odds of impact in a few months vs. weeks. And am waiting until another rev or two come out before I make any decisions as to whether being a bit more organized in how we approach our needs/desires with Tesla is making a difference.

The first premise, for me, still holds true. Being more organized and prioritized provides useful information to those developing products. Developing products by "following the tweet" is probably the worst way to build a product. If they implement every tweet the car would look like a plaid giraffe wearing clown shoes. How do they know that a single tweet or blog post is something that the whole community is focused on and would derive great benefit from? In general even our organized attempt to prioritize should be looked at in context with the product plan. It is feasible that an idea presented in our update is subsumed into something more complete or better. That would make me happy as long as we are getting the needs met.

My general advice is "follow your own path." if you want to tweet and blog requests to Tesla you should. Please don't let this type of organization stop you from doing so as there are a lot of great ideas out there that should not wait to be disclosed or brought forward. My "other" general advice is to give it a few months and, at least, one more minor rev before you give up on being organized and building some consensus on what the community feels is important. We can always pull in that great tweet or blog post and have the community rank it with the other needs and desires if we see that it is having some positive impact.

Thanks again msnow. This was really good/honest feedback and that is always appreciated. You are 100% correct that results are really all that matters. Having been on the other end of this equation I can tell you that I would find this information to be a goldmine. It is my hope that Tesla is as invested as I have been in my products to take this information and run with it. I just don't expect them to give any credit or recognition (especially for a first rev of a community attempt). This means I expected a lot of silence on the front end of the equation.

 

[supratachophobia]

I'd like to get back to work on this. With 7.1 in the wild, I'd like to take the list as it is and "check off" those items that made it in, and then release sexy graphs of what should show up in 7.2 based on the current information we already have. In other words, get some other items that were popular, pushed to the top for consideration by Tesla again.

 

[supratachophobia]

I'd like to start on a second round of voting for improvements to 7.2 and beyond. I have the currently list as it stood when voting closed. I've filtered out the suggestions that require hardware, and I'm working on taking out those items which made it into 7.1. Does anyone know of a good platform we could use to vote again, or was Tricider successful enough on the first attempt?

 

[xrayvsn]

I didn't get a chance to go over this lengthy post in its entirety but I was thinking of this simple suggestion in terms of interior temp control for the car:

If we really want to be efficient and preserve battery when possible why not have a comfortable temperature range setting rather than one single number. That way the air conditioner or heater doesn't have to keep turning on or off to keep interior exactly at current single designated temp. Also would help when seasons are transitioning like they are now. I keep temp lower when it's cold outside in morning but then have to raise temp when it is warmer in afternoon for drive home

 

[AWDtsla]

I didn't get a chance to go over this lengthy post in its entirety but I was thinking of this simple suggestion in terms of interior temp control for the car:

If we really want to be efficient and preserve battery when possible why not have a comfortable temperature range setting rather than one single number. That way the air conditioner or heater doesn't have to keep turning on or off to keep interior exactly at current single designated temp. Also would help when seasons are transitioning like they are now. I keep temp lower when it's cold outside in morning but then have to raise temp when it is warmer in afternoon for drive home

There are many cold weather items to be fixed. But this suggestion won't save any energy heating or cooling. In fact cycling a variable speed AC compressor will have loss in efficiency.

 

[Ingineer]

I know it's not software, but if Tesla was worried about HVAC efficiency, they would have added heat-pump capability. That would make a huge difference for most people, and the cost is negligible.

 

[Korben]

Cross your fingers. Reading this thread and the source article indicate we may see some headway. Very exciting!

Firmware 8.0