Model S web access

I am going to say right now that "I hope so".

I once had my car powering an inverter that powered my phone (and computer), which was USB tethered to my laptop which was streaming World Cup soccer, ESPN radio (because my phone couldn't play their stream for some odd reason). And the computer's audio was plugged back into my car's audio. I never want to have to do something like that again.

They are probably using Flash, and being an Adobe product they can't use it because of copyrights. Now, when Adobe gets the SDK there will be a port of Adobe products to the Tesla platform.

W.Petefish said:

They are probably using Flash, and being an Adobe product they can't use it because of copyrights. Now, when Adobe gets the SDK there will be a port of Adobe products to the Tesla platform.

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Nooooo.... Adobe products are buggy as heck and downright slow! Their Flash plugin crashes in my Chrome browser almost every day and so does Adobe Reader on my Win 7 m/c (it ends up freezing up the entire OS but, not sure who to blame for that one). I wouldn't want Tesla to bundle Adobe's port into a s/w update for all - if I can cherry pick updates and skip such an update, that'd be great!

I never said bundle. I was saying an add-on made by Adobe.

W.Petefish said:

I never said bundle. I was saying an add-on made by Adobe.

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Agreed. However, the only mechanism for delivering apps/add-ons to the Model S will be via Tesla's s/w updates, no?!

At current, yes. Later, no. I suspect that they'll have something like Google Play or Apple's App store.

At present, you can only play audio for the few sites Tesla provides. I was told several times over the past 3 years (until such time as the car formally shipped) that the car would stream any and ALL streams (audio and video) that are playable over a computer. Sadly, this promise (along with promises of folding side mirrors, blind side detection, etc) has been broken (at least as of today).

swegman said:

At present, you can only play audio for the few sites Tesla provides. I was told several times over the past 3 years (until such time as the car formally shipped) that the car would stream any and ALL streams (audio and video) that are playable over a computer. Sadly, this promise (along with promises of folding side mirrors, blind side detection, etc) has been broken (at least as of today).

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w.r.t. audio streams, that's a software issue; the promise hasn't been fulfilled, but I don't think it's fair to say it's been broken. As far as folding side mirrors, they have those. Power folding mirrors? Point to a place where an officer of Tesla Motors promised those, or to an official posting announcing them. Ditto for blind-side detection. Chats with random engineers don't count as a "corporate promise."

Robert, I said the promise has been broken at least as of today. You are correct that it could be added in the future. But as of today, its not. Re:, the mirrors, I stand corrected. I meant power folding mirrors. Several Tesla reps from the company (and later 2 in the DC store and 1 in the NYC store), not engineers, assured me the car would have power folding mirrors, blind side detection and some other features before I committed $40K in deposits ($35K for a signature and $5K for a production). In fact, they told me the blind side detection system was being sourced byMB.

Before putting down deposits, I explained that the blind-side detection system was very important to me because I have had 4 retinia detachments and my peripheral vision in my right eye is reduced (relative to the peripheral vision in my left eye), and thus, I would like any feature (blind-side detection, collision avoidance systems, etc), that could reduce the chance of an accident. The reps stated that the blind-side detecion system would be included in the car, and that they were working on a collision avoidance system. Fast forward several years to the test drives in DC, and I learned that these systems were not being included in the initial release. However, the people at the test drive event (who told me they were from the head office) told me that the power folding mirrors and blind-side detection system would be available in early 2013. As a result, I canceled the Signature reservation (as I could not defer it) and deferred the Production reservation to March, 2013 to see whether these systems get added to the car.

I love the Tesla, and it pains me that I had to cancel the Sig and delay delivery of the Production car. However, based on my medical condition, I want to get every safety feature possible on whatever car i purchase from now on. Don't get me wrong; in almost 40 years of driving, I have had no accidents and just 2 tickets, but my eyesight and reflexes are not what they were when I was 20 (even without the retinia issue). Thus, I repeatedly harped on these features with the reps and was repeatedly assured the car included them.

Does driving with the HD backup camera for blind spots not work? I would think that would work well. Do the blindspot systems detect smaller things like motorcycles consistently?

dsm363 said:

Does driving with the HD backup camera for blind spots not work? I would think that would work well. Do the blindspot systems detect smaller things like motorcycles consistently?

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i think he is referring to either a visual cue (as a flashing orange light) or a sound. the HD camera works but you have to visually go out of your way and move you visual field to see the screen.

I want to do a second test drive and at that time, I'd like to try pandora.com

They recently switched from flash to html5 so in theory it should work just fine on the Model S.

No HTML5 on Model S. I already tried Pandora and youtube.

Confirming - No HTML 5 and no Flash ATT.

Just following up here based on discussions in the Model S Connectivity Thread (Model S connectivity (service plan/upgradability/speed) - Page 8). The browser support HTML 5, but does not support HTML 5 audio/video.

The best way to test the browser's capability is to go to the following site in the car's browser:

http://html5test.com

ChadS ran on his car and scored 199/500, and confirmed no audio/video support.

setritt said:

i think he is referring to either a visual cue (as a flashing orange light) or a sound. the HD camera works but you have to visually go out of your way and move you visual field to see the screen.

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Side view mirrors also require one to change one's visual field. Particularly when I drive motorcycle, I am frequently checking, and it is a significant shift of vision. My instructors also stressed that shoulder checks were still critical when turning or changing lanes because it is far safer than a quick peek, so it is more dangerous NOT to "change your field of view". And when biking, I would much rather have someone look at an HD rear camera with wide field of view than someone who thinks he can cut in front of me because all he could muster was a tiny toss of the eye to look at a shiny light.

I agree with a poster on another thread a while back who said something to the effect of, "most of the new 'safety' tech merely encourages lazy and dangerous driving". If your health status means you are a dangerous driver, you shouldn't be on the road. If it's a matter of knowing your limits, then stick to those limits (speed, conditions, etc). Sorry for the mini-rant, but you all know how dangerous it can be on the road; most people at least know someone who has been killed or maimed by other bad drivers.

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@swegman, when I said "your health status" I wasn't referring to you, although you brought up the issue of health. It sounds like you DO in fact drive according to your limitations, and are not dangerous, and I respect you for that. My point is that I know people who drive like crazy beyond the conditions, expecting things like 4WD, traction control, little dots on the mirrors and auto braking to keep them and others safe, when in reality someone without these things could be safer simply because they are better drivers.

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Wow, sorry about going OT; umm... I think browsing the Web on the Model S is delayed until they get more quasi-safety features installed.

PureAmps said:

The best way to test the browser's capability is to go to the following site in the car's browser:
http://html5test.com

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Um, no. It's a pretty poor test. Unfortunate, since they nabbed a great domain name.

html5test.com said:

The HTML5 test does not try to test all of the new features offered by HTML5, nor does it try to test the functionality of each feature it does detect.

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Note the underlined.

So if I spent a weekend writing a "browser" that says "yes" to everything and draws a blank page, that implementation would receive a perfect score.

brianman said:

Um, no. It's a pretty poor test. Unfortunate, since they nabbed a great domain name.

So if I spent a weekend writing a "browser" that says "yes" to everything and draws a blank page, that implementation would receive a perfect score.

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True, but we know the car's browser is based on WebKit, so this was more of a quick check to see what features were enabled/disabled (e.g. video/audio tags).

I saw on one of the Tesla forums that the car's user agent string was "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; u; Linux; C) AppleWebKit /533.3 (Khtml, like Gheko) QtCarBrowser Safari /533.3".

Based on that it looks like they are using QtWebKit as the base, and most likely running version 2.0, so it is a bit dated:

QtWebKitRelease20 WebKit

Was somewhat expecting that I wouldn't be able to check Apple email, but wasn't expecting the error page to come up in a foreign language!