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United States based Model S internet connection working in Canada now (Dec 2014)

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Blurry_Eyed

MS Sig #267, MX Sig # 761
Dec 29, 2011
588
310
I just took a road trip over the weekend to Vancouver B.C. Much to my surprise, the 3G internet connection in my Model S worked perfectly fine in Canada. On my previous trips, once I crossed the border, the car would lose it's internet connection as it lost it's U.S. cell connection. I know that Canadian cars could cross the border and roam in the U.S. with an internet connection, but this is the first time my U.S. based car was able to roam and have an internet connection in Canada. Just thought I'd let all the U.S. owners that they now have browser and Google navigation access through the touchscreen in Canada.

Perhaps with an ever growing number of Canadian cars, Tesla was able to work out a roaming deal for U.S. cars with whomever (Rogers perhaps) provides the Canadian cars data connections?
 
Did Nav work while you were in Canada?

Yes, navigation worked for me in Ontario. However, my understanding is that it always has (through Navigon on the instrument cluster, but not on Google on the center stack). I preloaded all my destinations prior to leaving the US so I could just select the location from my past locations. Turns out I didn't need to do since Google Maps loaded successfully.
 
Yes, Navigation (if you have the on-board maps) has always worked fine in Canada. It has always worked, even prior to having an internet connection in Canada, if you put in the province in the 'State' field. For example when I travel to British Columbia, I put in BC as the state and the address field as normal. What is different now is you can use the Google search function on the touch screen and the car will search the internet through Google maps to find what you are looking for and give you the choices to populate into the navigation system, just like it does here in the United States. For example, if you enter 'Starbucks' it will pull up a list of Starbucks to select from and you can put that into the Nav system. Also you can enter an address from the search bar and it will go to Google maps and enter that automatically into the nav system for you. Much more user friendly now.

The first time I went to Canada and did not have an internet connection, I didn't know the trick of entering the province abbreviation into the 'State' field for the navigation system. Because it wouldn't search Google without an internet connection, it would not auto-populate the navigation destination system, so I wasn't able to use the on-board map system. Took me two trips into Canada to finally figure it out! But it's all moot now that we have a live internet connection available in Canada for U.S. based cars now.
 
Interesting and great news if true for all vehicles. I visit Canada a few times a year and always feel a little uneasy without my data connection. Plus I like to be able to check charge status while away from the vehicle.
 
I took delivery in mid-March, and took a road trip to Vancouver the next morning. Had no problems with internet roaming in Canada. I was able to search for public charging stations using the web browser. Same thing when I was in Victoria last month.