How TF are people who live in apartments supposed to update?

[importon]

Is Tesla's mission to get everyone into an EV and FSD, or just the people who live in houses with a strong WIFI connection?

I live in an apartment building with no WIFI in the underground parking. I paid $15,000 for an additional software feature, and I pay monthly for Tesla premium connectivity. Out of all the data that comes with premium connectivity you'd think the software that runs f***n car would be a no-brainer. They are fine with me downloading literally terabytes worth of songs, and videos, but 1gb of the software that runs the car and keeps my $15,000 upgrade up to date is off limits??!

What is their plan moving forward for the millions of people who live in apartments?

 

[smogne41]

OP, You will absolutely get updates over LTE, just far fewer. The car will automatically download a few updates a year this way, ones that Tesla considers important. You can then choose to accept the installation of the update or not. When I was off WiFI for 2 years I would still get about 3-4 updates a year downloaded to the car.

Do you have a good LTE signal in your parking garage?

 

[mjwojtukiewicz]

OP, You will absolutely get updates over LTE, just far fewer. The car will automatically download a few updates a year this way, ones that Tesla considers important. You can then choose to accept the installation of the update or not. When I was off WiFI for 2 years I would still get about 3-4 updates a year downloaded to the car.

I thought you need premium service for LTE to work

 

[smogne41]

I thought you need premium service for LTE to work

Not sure.

 

[uscbucsfan]

I thought you need premium service for LTE to work

You still have LTE, just a limited version without premium service. You still can use navigation, which uses LTE.

 

[derotam]

I thought you need premium service for LTE to work

Nope, how do you think your phone app connects to the car? LTE is always working.

 

[bpnine]

I do get OP's complaints about it. They do seem to act like it's inconceivable that you don't have access to wifi where the car is parked. The car constantly nags you every few days about connecting to wifi for updates, and the updates download slowly enough that it's not convenient to just connect to my phone and sit in the car or go to a public wifi hotspot. My commute also isn't quite long enough to download a full update.

I do feel like it should at least be a part of premium connectivity or at least let us download the updates to a USB flash drive and do it that way. Not a deal breaker, but annoying nonetheless.

Agreed, its understandable that pushing 3GB to everyone is going to be costly - but it would be appropriate with human interaction (hit a button in the UI that says 'download over premium connectivity please this time'). I suspect a very tiny % of folks would use that so it would be similar to streaming a movie or two for their bottom line.

 

[uscbucsfan]

Agreed, its understandable that pushing 3GB to everyone is going to be costly - but it would be appropriate with human interaction (hit a button in the UI that says 'download over premium connectivity please this time'). I suspect a very tiny % of folks would use that so it would be similar to streaming a movie or two for their bottom line.

Do you think this is realistic? There's very little chance they allow this as an option.

 

[richyrich]

Connecting to my phone costs even more money on top of what I already paid and continue to pay, and can take hours, even days to download the update.

Not in my experience - I did one via tethering a couple of weeks back because I had time to kill and wanted the update. It took maybe 30 mins total. No biggie and not a lot of data.

 

[terranx]

Do you think this is realistic? There's very little chance they allow this as an option.

Would be reasonable at least for the safety related updates / recalls.

 

[uscbucsfan]

Would be reasonable at least for the safety related updates / recalls.

Typically those will go out over cell as it is, as long as people decide to download them.

 

[JulienW]

4 year Tesla owner (in 3 weeks) and live in a high rise condo with my car in a parking deck and have never had my WiFi as access. Most updates I just hotspot from my iPhone. While not as convenient as WiFi it is not that bad. Map Data updates are the largest (but only happen about ever 9 months) at over 5GB. Most firmware updates are in the 2GB to 3GB range and usually in an hour or less. I get a notification on my Apple Watch when it is downloaded and read to install.

Was nice in the early days of the FSD Beta program we got all updates over LTE. That was for about a year until they expanded the Beta program.

In the grand scheme of things this is somewhat minor and easy. Just try updating a Porsche by simply using your iPhone. If an update was offered you would need to schedule an appointment and....... So I place having to hotspot in the not so F'en hard 1st world problem basket.

 

[ucmndd]

Would be reasonable at least for the safety related updates / recalls.

If they really want you to have an update they WILL push it over LTE - no action required.

 

[uscbucsfan]

If they really want you to have an update they WILL push it over LTE - no action required.

You still have to accept it, but it will come over LTE. I've received 3 Beta updates over LTE.

 

[ucmndd]

Not in my experience - I did one via tethering a couple of weeks back because I had time to kill and wanted the update. It took maybe 30 mins total. No biggie and not a lot of data.

Same. The actual download part of the update is generally pretty brief in my experience, and you can drive away and go about your business while it’s doing all the unpacking, pre-staging, etc.

 

[terranx]

If they really want you to have an update they WILL push it over LTE - no action required.

I’ve never received any of the updates specified with the recall notices over lte.

 

[BitJam]

What is their plan moving forward for the millions of people who live in apartments?

You have a valid complaint about the low update rate if you don't have wifi. OTOH, Tesla has a valid reason for not pushing most updates over LTE: they have a massive phone bill and pushing updates over LTE would make it skyrocket. They stagger software updates even for wifi users probably, in part, to avoid swamping their own servers.

We all get things like navigation and voice commands over LTE for free. I have no doubt Tesla knows the average cost they bear for providing premium connectivity and have set the price accordingly so the don't lose money from it and probably gain some. Providing timely updates over LTE would be a big expense with no direct return especially if customers start denying their cars wifi access to take advantage of the the free bandwidth offered by Tesla. Nightmare!

Here is a reddit post that goes into more detail of how Tesla uses LTE.

Tesla Mode 3 LTE Coverage: Who Does Tesla Use For LTE Service?

For apartment dwellers, for now, Tesla adding wifi to the superchargers and having impatient people use their own hotspots should suffice. You're right that going forward Tesla will need to do better. They plan to solve the FSD problem real soon now. Once FSD is solved, the urgency of frequent updates will probably diminish and this could become a non-issue. There may also be a plan-B.

The SpaceX Starlink deal with T-Mobile is huge:

T-Mobile Takes Coverage Above and Beyond With SpaceX - T-Mobile Newsroom

In a live event today, T-Mobile and SpaceX announced Coverage Above and Beyond: a breakthrough new plan to bring cell phone connectivity nearly everywhere.

www.t-mobile.com

Many of the places where I drive now don't have cell coverage which is a drag. I hope this Starlink deal will eventually fix that. In addition, SpaceX (not Tesla) will have a lot of clout in the telecom biz. My guess is that with the Starlink backbone Tesla will end up with cheaper LTE coverage for their fleet which will fix the current update bottleneck for some apartment dwellers.

 

[smogne41]

Here is a question though, do most of use really NEED more than 2-4 updates a year? For my car I am getting more and more firmly into the camp of wanting less updates but ones that are far better tested/debugged. Sure if you are beta testing FSD, you will need more updates. But for the rest of us, we mostly just want a car that works reliably. That is fundamentally in tension with frequent updates.

A frequent update cadence also encourages change-for-changes sake, which is almost always leads to a degraded experience (eg V11 UI).

 

[mjwojtukiewicz]

Here is a question though, do most of use really NEED more than 2-4 updates a year? For my car I am getting more and more firmly into the camp of wanting less updates but ones that are far better tested/debugged. Sure if you are beta testing FSD, you will need more updates. But for the rest of us, we mostly just want a car that works reliably. That is fundamentally in tension with frequent updates.

A frequent update cadence also encourages change-for-changes sake, which is almost always leads to a degraded experience (eg V11 UI).

Here's the problem. The non FSD updates get some nice features. I can't fathom now no FSD updates be incorporated into the FSD updates. Seems like
there are too many coding teams

 

[uscbucsfan]

Here is a question though, do most of use really NEED more than 2-4 updates a year? For my car I am getting more and more firmly into the camp of wanting less updates but ones that are far better tested/debugged. Sure if you are beta testing FSD, you will need more updates. But for the rest of us, we mostly just want a car that works reliably. That is fundamentally in tension with frequent updates.

A frequent update cadence also encourages change-for-changes sake, which is almost always leads to a degraded experience (eg V11 UI).

The owner (you) has a choice. You can put your updates on Standard and not worry about each new feature or whatever. Standard, from what I've read, is pretty minimal well tested updates, but I've never tried it.

 

[importon]

Agreed, its understandable that pushing 3GB to everyone is going to be costly - but it would be appropriate with human interaction (hit a button in the UI that says 'download over premium connectivity please this time'). I suspect a very tiny % of folks would use that so it would be similar to streaming a movie or two for their bottom line.

How about pushing updates to people who paid 15k for a software feature? That’s great business no matter how you slice it. Or push updates to people who they detect are never/rarely connected to WiFi which would indicate they’re out of range.