Welcome to Tesla Motors Club
Discuss Tesla's Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y, Cybertruck, Roadster and More.
Register

How to be sure, the car is connected by wifi ?

This site may earn commission on affiliate links.
Hi Every body...! ;-)
I'm a new user of a great P85D for 2 weeks.


Could you tell me how you know your Tesla is connected at the wifi at home ?


Personaly, I don't see any difference, except the "E" of Edge on the screen...the 3G doesn't work well inside my garage.
Further more, I see my home network, and I set the password to let the car connecting.


And then, I checked on my router, if the car (with her Mac Address) is well connected. It seems to be ok, but I do not see any sign on the screen to confirm it's well connected. I'm quite surprised...


Somebody could help me ?


Thanks !!!


Greg
 
Congrats on your P85D! I might be misunderstanding your question, but you should see the universal wifi symbol at the top of the screen in place of the "E" or "3G" bars. Something like this:

wifi.jpg
 
Hi Every body...! ;-)
I'm a new user of a great P85D for 2 weeks.


Could you tell me how you know your Tesla is connected at the wifi at home ?


Personaly, I don't see any difference, except the "E" of Edge on the screen...the 3G doesn't work well inside my garage.
Further more, I see my home network, and I set the password to let the car connecting.


And then, I checked on my router, if the car (with her Mac Address) is well connected. It seems to be ok, but I do not see any sign on the screen to confirm it's well connected. I'm quite surprised...


Somebody could help me ?


Thanks !!!


Greg

You don't get a little WIFI icon where the 3G icon used to be?
 
No :-(((((( only the signal for the 3G or E for the edge...and no the traditional symbol of wifi :-(

But, what I don't understand, I can see the Mac Address on the devices lits connected...

- - - Updated - - -

And, when I put the password to connect to the wifi, I have no error message...
 
The other way to tell from your router or WAP's UI is that you would see the Tesla as a device under DHCP clients or wireless clients or something like that. If you are able to use OUI to look up the manufacturer from the Wifi's chips MAC it will likely show up as a Parrot device.
 
Historically, some clients do not play well with some routers, most often due to one of the two devices having a subtle bug in its implementation of a security protocol. It's much rarer now, but still common enough that it does happen.

If in doubt, switch something on your router and see if the car likes it better: maybe it likes WPA2 with AES better than TKIP. Maybe it likes TKIP better or WPA.

Not a "solution" per se, but you can often get by, assuming it doesn't also break other devices on your network. Or, if the router is old, just use it as an excuse to upgrade and get one with a little NAS-y thing or other key feature you haven't been able to convince your wife that you need. ;)
 
surefire way is to navigate to ipchicken.com

if it says something about ATT in the resolved address then you are on cellular

if it says something about your ISP then you are on wifi.

also ive noticed that the tesla will not connect to certain channels on wifi, set your wifi to CH1 or the lowest one, and use WPA2-Personal with AES encryption, an 8 character password with no special characters, only letters and numbers.
 
FIX: Enable 802.11g on your Wireless Router

You know your are CONNECTED to WiFi if you see the WiFi icon where you currently see 3G or Edge.

You need to enable 802.11g and or 802.11b on your router. These are older protocols but unfortunately it is what the Model S requires. Your router will see the MAC address of your Model S and you can see and attempt to connect to your hotspot, but it won't be able to unless you enable these older protocols. If you want to keep your router as is, you can just get an older router and configure it as an access point using the older protocols. Almost all newer devices use 802.11n and very new ones use 802.11ac. Of the 20 or so WiFi devices on my network, only the Tesla Model S and my daughters Nintendo DS require 802.11g! Yes, this sucks and won't improve until Tesla upgrades to a newer computer hardware platform (nVidia Tegra X1?).
 
Last edited:
IYou need to enable 802.11g and or 802.11b on your router. These are older protocols but unfortunately it is what the Model S requires. Your router will see the MAC address of your Model S and you can see and attempt to connect to your hotspot said:
Thank you for posting that. I've been unable to connect my spiffy new S85 via Wifi. But after reading your post I pulled out a router I have not used in years and right there on the front of the box it indicated it supported 802.11g and 802.11b.

Plugged it in and moved it close to the car and just like that it worked. Whew!

'Course that just led to me sitting in the car in the garage playing on the web for more time that I care to admit. :)
 
surefire way is to navigate to ipchicken.com

if it says something about ATT in the resolved address then you are on cellular

if it says something about your ISP then you are on wifi.

also ive noticed that the tesla will not connect to certain channels on wifi, set your wifi to CH1 or the lowest one, and use WPA2-Personal with AES encryption, an 8 character password with no special characters, only letters and numbers.

Doesn't Tesla always use a VPN, which would mean you would in either case get the information about the VPN and not your internet connection ?
 
I would be shocked if your router didn't support 802.11g. It is unlikely that it was turned off but you should be able to fix that in the web UI for your router. A lot of devices still use 802.11g, even brand new devices as they don't necessarily need to transmit a lot of data. This will increasingly be the case as more IoT devices appear in your home. One example of this is a Fitbit Aria smart scale.
 
Doesn't Tesla always use a VPN, which would mean you would in either case get the information about the VPN and not your internet connection ?

nope, ipchicken indicates sometimes im going through AT&T (the Cell connection) or that im going through my home internet's gateway (Shaw cable canada)and when i connect using my cell phones wifi hotspot i get Telus mobility (which is correct)

try it out and see, this is what i have observed but not tested it recently with all the new firmware

- - - Updated - - -

I would be shocked if your router didn't support 802.11g. It is unlikely that it was turned off but you should be able to fix that in the web UI for your router. A lot of devices still use 802.11g, even brand new devices as they don't necessarily need to transmit a lot of data. This will increasingly be the case as more IoT devices appear in your home. One example of this is a Fitbit Aria smart scale.

to remain backwards compatible with G means you are going to take a hit on performance, running mixed mode will not allow you to get the full 1300mbit throughput. however this is just a simple setting on the router. i decided not to make the rest of my devices suffer so i got a separate dedicated wifi AP for the car.
 
Per this thread I decided to leave my car hooked to WiFi tonight just to see if maps or software receive any updates overnight (I'm still on 2.4.160 and I see some people are up to 2.4.188).

All looked fine until I got out of the car and closed the door at which time the touchscreen went dark (as it usually does when no one is in the car and the door is closed).

Is the car still hooked to WiFi and able to receive updates when the touchscreen is dark? Or do I need to do something to keep the touchscreen on?
 
nope, ipchicken indicates sometimes im going through AT&T (the Cell connection) or that im going through my home internet's gateway (Shaw cable canada)and when i connect using my cell phones wifi hotspot i get Telus mobility (which is correct)

try it out and see, this is what i have observed but not tested it recently with all the new firmware
(snip)

I would love to try it on my car, but I sadly don't own a Tesla ! ;-)

Strange though that ipchicken get information about AT&T or your ISP. I guess I don't really know how VPN and ip lookup works.
 
Last edited:
Is the car still hooked to WiFi and able to receive updates when the touchscreen is dark? Or do I need to do something to keep the touchscreen on?

Yes it is. If you have the 'always connected' option set in the car, you will find it remains connected to your WiFi router the whole time it is parked. If not, it needs to be woken up over the cellular connection (or by the charging timer etc.), but will then connect to WiFi again when it wakes up.

Strange tough that ipchicken get information about AT&T or your ISP. I guess I don't really know how VPN and ip lookup works.

Tesla's internal connection (including controls from the mobile app) appear to go through a VPN, but other things - browsing, audio, nav system fetching traffic info etc. just goes as normal IP traffic direct from the car to the destination.

In the UK this causes us problems with the internet radio: due to Tesla's europe-wide coverage deal with Telefonica, the cars have Spanish IP addresses, and BBC radio channels are only available to UK IP addresses. Hence you can start listening to a station while connected over WiFi, but can't then get that same station when connected over cellular. Tesla are working on a work-around...
 
(snip)
Tesla's internal connection (including controls from the mobile app) appear to go through a VPN, but other things - browsing, audio, nav system fetching traffic info etc. just goes as normal IP traffic direct from the car to the destination.

In the UK this causes us problems with the internet radio: due to Tesla's europe-wide coverage deal with Telefonica, the cars have Spanish IP addresses, and BBC radio channels are only available to UK IP addresses. Hence you can start listening to a station while connected over WiFi, but can't then get that same station when connected over cellular. Tesla are working on a work-around...

Ok, that explains it. Thanks !
 
Yes it is. If you have the 'always connected' option set in the car, you will find it remains connected to your WiFi router the whole time it is parked. If not, it needs to be woken up over the cellular connection (or by the charging timer etc.), but will then connect to WiFi again when it wakes up.

Thanks. I just checked and found the 'always connected' option was not selected so I selected it. Now I guess I just wait until later today to see if anything changes.