As an indispensable companion to the electric car, the Tesla application is quite well provided. Many essential features have been present for years, such as the key on the smartphone or the visualization of the status of the vehicle in real time. Let’s take a look at what it lacks to make it perfect.
A Tesla is a real computer on wheels. To be able to obtain information about their vehicle, owners have the possibility of going through a very extensive mobile application. Available on iOS and Android, it has been enriched year after year with new functions, more or less gadget.
Most Tesla Model 3 and Model Y drivers take advantage of a key feature of the mobile app, namely the key on the phone. This means that you don’t need any key or card to be able to unlock and drive in your Tesla, which is an invaluable convenience on a daily basis.
In addition to this, it is possible to precondition the cabin to the temperature you want, or even to see the precise location of your car on a map. However, for years now, functions have been missing, even though Tesla has the ability to give all this information to owners. Let’s take a look at what we want to see happen in the Tesla app to make it perfect.
1. Load management worthy of the name
This may seem shocking to those unfamiliar with Tesla, but this giant of electric mobility and electricity charging and storage solutions offers charging management that is globally unworthy of its leadership status — yes, we don’t don’t mince our words. Indeed, this criticism comes up almost systematically with new owners, who discover with great disappointment all that it is not possible to do via the mobile application, when they have to charge at home.
In France, as in many other countries, many electric car drivers charge at home, during hours when electricity is cheaper. For this to be optimized, the car must therefore be told to start charging at a certain time, and that it stops charging when the rate starts to rise again.
For a typical off-peak time range of 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., you have to be able to say: charging starts at 10 p.m. and stops at 6 a.m. Hold on tight: this is simply impossible in Tesla. The only options offered relating to the charging schedule are either a charging start time or a desired charging end time, but never both. Worse still, Tesla has managed to unnecessarily complicate its scheduled charging management by adding a confusing “Off-Peak Charging” option.
It is possible to enter only an end time, but no start time, which means that in practice, charging can start before the start of off-peak hours if your Tesla judges that the charging limit cannot be reached before the end time.
If you understand nothing or almost nothing, it is unfortunately normal. The explanations of Tesla’s online manual are also of an abyssal complexity, even though offering an interactive calendar with ranges of charging hours to fill in should take them less time to develop than a whoopee cushion that the ‘we activate with the turn signals…
All this is all the more incomprehensible since other manufacturers have been able to offer a customizable charging schedule for many years, like Renault or Hyundai as you can see above.
2. Being able to plan your trips correctly
A Tesla happily takes advantage of the network of Superchargers to be able to navigate through Europe without incident. If this is a major asset for all those who simply wish to enter a destination and be guided by the car, it is clear that the proposed route is not always optimal.
On board the vehicle, it is possible to modify a route to add intermediate points, which is useful if you want to favor one Supercharger over another. From the mobile application, you can enter a destination and a battery level at the start, but absolutely nothing else.
In other words, it is not possible to indicate to the mobile application that you want to arrive with 50% battery, or that you do not want to go through the path that is suggested. You will see below three examples of route planning with each time an expected arrival around 10% battery, which may be insufficient in many cases.
In addition, the stops offered are often meaningless, for example with the “middle” route to Nantes, which uses two old Superchargers (V2, limited to 150 kW), even though many V3 Superchargers are strewn along the route.
It clearly lacks many parameters found in route planners dedicated to electric mobility.
3. View trip and load history
Tesla’s API is very complete, to the delight of advanced users. For customers who do not wish to get their hands dirty, however, we regret the lack of information displayed by the American manufacturer within its application. It would be welcome to display a detailed history of each day the car was used, including charging time, duration and details of each trip.
All this information is indeed published by the Tesla API, and many services exist to offer a visualization of all this data. So there’s everything needed for Tesla to show a visualization of the data just in the app, but right now… it doesn’t.
Tesla took a step in the right direction a few months ago, however, by adding some charging-related stats, but like trip planning, it all lacks personalization.
There is no possibility to see the detail of the different charges for each day, nor even to add places different from his home or his work. There is therefore still a long way to go for Elon Musk’s firm to offer a visualization of the charges and the different routes that is at the level of what we are entitled to expect in 2023.
4. Make better use of vehicle features
The tesla app could easily become an extension of the car’s main screen, as a remote control, for example. When the occupants use one of the many entertainment applications available (YouTube, Netflix, Twitch, etc.), one could imagine that the application is used to navigate between the different videos, rather than having to touch the screen.
Similarly, to navigate between the different driving profiles, acceleration modes or any vehicle setting accessible on the central screen, the mobile application could be relevant.
Unfortunately, Tesla seems to be putting more energy elsewhere, such as on self-driving capability in the US, which is still in beta. Let’s hope, however, that the future holds good surprises for the mobile application, and that it finally ends up being perfect for owners.
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