Submitted by Based on several posts on Twitter, it seems that Tesla owners around the world are reporting not being able to connect their phone to their vehicle or, in some cases, not even being able to start the car.
Tesla owners should be used to being beta testers.
Thom, I wish you’d left the article in because I dislike twitter replacing articles… oh well, no biggie, haha.
I think this outage with Telsa mirrors one of the big engineering flaws that’s happening with IoT in general. Too much technology today is being engineered to replace local functionality. The product is sitting right there beside you? Great, now just connect to us over the internet in order to control it. Yuck! Whether it’s chromebooks that are designed to send print jobs to google, nest devices that are on wifi but cannot be controlled locally, tesla and other cars with local features controlled by a remote service, it’s the same predictable and avoidable failure modes.
Before remote IoT services became the norm, it used to be that engineers always provided local control regardless of if it had a wifi interface. But these days it’s gotten much harder to identify products that can be controlled locally without remote services like siri/alexa/etc. When I wanted a network thermostat, it was a chore to find something that could be network control yet wasn’t tethered to a 3rd party.
Recently I bought a string of bluetooth/wifi lights hoping to take them on family camping trips and control them with my phone. However they arrived and much to my disappointment the lights are not in fact controlled via bluetooth. The bluetooth is only used to bootstrap the wifi to get online and connect through a damn service provider…exactly what I wanted to avoid! Argh! I managed to get them to working without provisioning the network, but it’s really fragile and hacky. I’m all for home automation, but I’m irked that it’s become so hard to get untethered products that aren’t locked into a proprietary service.
I feel you. Some years ago I bought a smart scale that indicates body fat, bones weight, etc. It connected to the phone and it stored you date on the cloud (along a couple of fitness apps of the company). Then Adidas bought it and it became crap. The service for the scale was discontinued and now it only shows your weight.
I made sure when I bought a new set of bathroom scales they were mechanical. No they are not as accurate as electronic bathroom scales but I don’t need to bother with batteries or something going wrong. I just need “close enough” and close enough to determine whether the trend is going up or going down. I’m not worried about an individual kilo one way or the other.
I’m glad you mentioned the complexity of weighing. BMI is a simple tool but not really accurate and inappropriate once you step away from the average. It is a tool invented by insurance companies and not a proper medical tool although it is used in medical contexts. I’m sure you already know this but by chance yesterday I watched two youtubes of women body builders – Rene Campbell and Irene Andersen. Going by the BMI formula they would both be obese yet were a wall of muscle with low body fat. The BMI tool fails for other women too who can be overweight according to the tool but because of body fat distribution aren’t as unhealthily fat as BMI suggests.
I bought that scale because I wanted to measure the body fat. You don´t need a internet connection for that.
Yes, the BMI is pretty useless. For that reason if you want something accurate you need to measure your body fat, various body´s dimensions, take into account the physical activity …
Oops, it didn´t save the link I added for some reason. Fixed!
It’s because of the Silicon Valley business model: everything is just software and services. it’s all about how many users you have. For IPO, etc. Maybe Tesla is kind of the exception.
This still terrifies me. The idea that the car I am driving can be influenced by online interference. Its not hard to imagine this could be exploited by an authoritarian state or even criminal organisations.
1) I’m not rich. My wife and I both work. We gave up vacations and our other cars are 16 and 20 years old. We saved up that money to buy our Model Y and it is —EASILY— the best car that I have ever driven and second place is so far behind that I can barely see the other cars. While my personal cars are old I’ve driven plenty of new work cars which are mostly Toyotas so not lacking in quality.
If you’ve not driven a Tesla and you mock Teslas and Tesla owners then all I can say is, I hope you are happy with your horse and buggy and buggy whip because gas cars are ABSOLUTELY totally outclassed by electric cars. I’ve driven the future and the future IS electric cars.
2) You get a key card with your Tesla. Oh my (fake) HORROR at having to take my Tesla key card out of my wallet and run it along the B pillar to open it op and put it just behind the drink holders to drive it. Oh my (fake) HORROR.
Get a GRIP on reality people. This was a tiny inconvenience. People with actual keys have to reach into their pocket every day to pull out keys and put them in their door or hit a button on their key fob to unlock their door and then get into their cars. The fact that I have (fake horror) one day when I have to take out my key card to drive, a TOTAL NON ISSUE.
3) You don’t have to use Tesla Full Self Driving. You can (fake gasp) actually drive it just like any car with an automatic transmission. You put it in drive, you push down the accelerator and my (fake gasp) it goes forwards. You (fake gasp) put it in reverse and it (fake gasp) goes backwards. Oh my (fake gasp) it … just … works!
4) Tesla Full Self Driving, if you want to believe it or not is ahead of everyone other self driving software out there. The others only work in a small very defined space. Is Tesla Full Self Driving perfect? No? Oh my (fake gasp) God, ALL OF US TESLA DRIVERS KNOW THAT. The only people that don’t are the people that have never driven a Tesla and never tried Tesla Full Self Driving. No it isn’t perfect but guess what, 98% of the time it is. You watch small videos in small parts of cities where it doesn’t work. BIG DEAL. Have you watched all the videos where there are no issues? Of course not because there is nothing interesting about something when it is just working.
5) Elon Musk knows how to push people to do amazing work just like Steve Jobs did. Yes, both can be a***h**** but when you know that your life here on earth is limited and you see in your mind how long it is going to take to get things down at the normal pace of business and you KNOW that isn’t going to be fast enough. Then you have to do SOMETHING to get people to work faster, to imagine faster, to embrace the future and do things you never thought you could do.
If you only do what you think you can do, at the speed that things have always been done, then very little progress will be made. You MUST set unreal expectations. You MUST tell the world that something is gone to be done by X date or everyone on that team will be working on X date plus 5 or 10 years in the future and that just … isn’t … fast … enough.
Therefore doesn’t call it what it is which is a driver’s aid. He doesn’t want his programmers and his imagineers (not their titles but it should be) because if they can’t imagine it, they can’t create it. If they can’t create it then it never will be. So you DO set UNREAL time lines. You DO set the bar UNREASONABLY high.
Just ask the greatest sports players that ever lived. If they thought only about being as great as those before them then they never would have stood out in the crowd. But they did DREAM of being GREAT and only because that they were able to be what they became. That and the LUCK of TIMING (when they were born) and physical abilities (like a high IQ plus drive to create the future and not just making incremental changes compared to the past.
THAT is why Elon Musk calls it Tesla Full Self Driving. Not because it IS, but because that is what he WANTS it to be. And only by forcing people to think beyond what they think is possible can you create something more incredible, more magic than they ever thought possible.
Compared to ANY gas car I’ve ever driven, and I’ve drive more than a few $80,000 cars. They feel like the 1990s compared to my Tesla. And for that, I’ll take the Beta version of Tesla Full Self Driving any day of the week.
Meanwhile, enjoy your horse and buggy.
Calm down. It’s just a car. Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
Sabon,
You’re two posts come across as extremely defensive…has anyone criticized you for driving a Tesla?
I wouldn’t mock anyone for driving a Tesla. But to be honest it’s not for me. Not that I’m against EVs at all, but I really dislike touchscreens as the interface for everything. I personally feel it is regressive compared to tactile controls. Also, I find over the air activation for things like Tesla’s seat warmers for an additional cost is extremely tacky!!! Oh god I hope this doesn’t catch on. It has made gaming much worse and it would be a very negative trend for the auto industry. Just my opinion.
Still, I’m glad Tesla is finally pushing the market towards EVs. There’s been a huge demand for EVs for decades yet unfortunately the manufacturers and oil industry did everything they could to keep it away. The “Who killed the electric car” documentary illustrates just how nuts it was with manufacturers sending EVs for disposal as their own customers were begging to buy them. I don’t think it ever took much insight to see that the demand for EVs was always strong, but alas big auto was beholden to the oil companies and this stifled the industry. IMHO we’re at least a quarter century behind where we should be with EVs.
So it’s great that people are trying to be eco-friendly with EVs, but big obstacles remain. The costs still need to come down for most buyers. Unfortunately the electric grid isn’t really up to the task of charging everyone’s EV as more people own them. Here in NY I regularly incur brownouts with the grid dropping below 90V (supposed to be 120V RMS nominal) during air conditioner season. That means drawing 33% more amps. This is already very bad, but even so it can get worse and some states are already suffering blackouts. Whether we like it or not, EVs do contribute to that. I think the problems are solvable, but it’s going to take tons of money to upgrade the infrastructure to support EVs for the general population.
>Not that I’m against EVs at all, but I really dislike touchscreens as the interface for everything.
Yeah same, that’s why I use voice controls for 99% of things (press right button, “temp 71”, etc). But this isn’t really an “EV” thing, some ICE cars are just as guilty in removing tactile controls.
>Also, I find over the air activation for things like Tesla’s seat warmers for an additional cost is extremely tacky!!!
Not familiar with this, even my Model 3 came with seat warmers at no additional cost.
>The costs still need to come down for most buyers.
And it will, over time, and the ranges will increase. Right now early buyers are funding those developments. Just like gas cars weren’t available to “everyone” immediately. I can assure you electric cars will be available to everyone far quicker than ICE cars were.
>Unfortunately the electric grid isn’t really up to the task of charging everyone’s EV as more people own them.
The grid will grow as demand from EVs, and demand in general, grows.
>but it’s going to take tons of money to upgrade the infrastructure to support EVs for the general population.
Yes, which is why Biden’s new infrastructure plan is a great start. Huge investments in charging infrastructure are coming.
cmdrlinux,
Have you tried all the seats?
https://insideevs.com/news/399322/tesla-mode-3-heated-rear-seats-upgrade/
The thing is It’s going to cost trillions to upgrade the power grid. Until then our blackouts & brownouts are going to keep getting worse.
https://www.rt.com/business/516669-us-power-grid-upgrading-cost/
Everyone is going to end up subsidizing the power grid for the benefit of EV owners. To be fair I think it’s ultimately necessary for the sake of combating carbon emissions, but it’s not a trivial effort or cost.
The infrastructure plan is a fraction of what it was supposed to be. I think that most of us agree that it’s a far cry from what the country needs…ah politics.
I didn’t realize Elon Musk had a user account at OS News!
1) Zip2 – Elon Musk and others brought the yellow pages to the internet. When was the last time you pick up a big soft bound book to look up someone’s phone number. You don’t anymore because of Elon Musk and the other founders of Zip2
2) X.com and PayPal – Because of Elon Musk and other founders you no longer have to call a bank or call a business to buy something. Instead you can buy it on-line through PayPal which he sold to eBay
3) SpaceX – Elon changed the way that EVERY rocket company and government agency thinks about what it means when you talk about building rockets. His company is the only non governmental agency to get people and supplies to the international space station. His company is going to get is back to the moon. His company is going to get us to Mars.
4) Tesla – EVERY car company in the world is being forced to build electric cars OR go bankrupt because of Tesla. Instead of continuing to pollute by using gas or diesel he took a struggling car company that was trying to use laptop batteries and has made it into one of the most valuable companies in the United States. And due to lack of foresight a lot of other car companies may go bankrupt if they don’t change from their old ways and get on board and convert over to electric ONLY cars.
5) SolarCity and Tesla Energy – Elon Musk has built this into one of the largest power companies in the world and is pushing coal and natural gas power generators into bankruptcy because of how they pollute
6) Neuralink – In 2016, Musk co-founded Neuralink, a neurotechnology startup company to integrate the human brain with AI. Neuralink’s purpose is to create devices that are embedded in the human brain to facilitate the merging of the brain with machines. The devices will also reconcile with the latest improvements in artificial intelligence to stay updated. Such improvements could enhance memory or allow the devices to communicate with software more effectively.
And what have you done with your life people that mock Tesla Full Self Driving and other things that Elon Musk has accomplished. Most likely Jack Squat other than continuing in tradition jobs where you do provide for your family but you LIKE ME will only be handed down in our family’s memories but not the world’s. Elon Musk is one of the most important people in the last 100 years if not THE most important person.
And us? We’ve basically done jack squat.
I’m with Thom, you’re over the top.
Yeah, this is a scary level of blinkered fanboyism. Haven’t seen anything quite like this in a long time.
I sure as hell won’t buy a car where the vehicle won’t work at least in basic function, meaning I can drive it, without a connection to some server somewhere and/or “permission” to use it. A power outage, network attack, or a crashed server should never have the ability to disable my car.
friedchicken,
It won’t surprise anyone here that I’m also wary of online dependencies, haha. It gives companies too much power to control hardware they do not own even after point of sale. The law requiring vehicles to have an OBD diagnostics port doesn’t apply to EVs, and so EV companies can get away with using proprietary diagnostics tools that local mechanics can’t access. I wouldn’t want to see the auto industry collapse into manufacturers having monopolies on repairs. I hope the laws catch on to this and requires EV manufacturers to open up the specs so that owners can go to their own mechanics.
https://www.sfgate.com/cars/article/tesla-repair-wait-time-complaints-electric-car-13796037.php
You can drive a Tesla with Zero internet connectivity.
This outage was about optional online services.
javiercero1,
Except that phones are being uses as keys, which are pretty important and can literally leave people stranded when it doesn’t work.
Maybe you have to tell owners this feature is not designed to be a robust replacement for keys and that they always need to carry a separate physical key with them. If that’s the answer, ok, but if you always need to carry a key around it sort of defeats the selling point of unlocking via phone – you don’t need keys anymore. I actually think phone unlock is pretty cool, but it seems obvious that Tesla should have engineered the feature to work locally without failure modes when Tesla servers go down. I think it’s a fair criticism.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15340368/how-the-tesla-model-3-works-without-a-key-or-a-fob/
Lot of misinformation in your post. I have a Tesla, a Model 3. The phone uses bluetooth to unlock the car, no internet connectivity required. They also give you two NFC key cards, the size of credit cards. I keep one in my wallet at all times in case I lose my phone or it is damaged. It can unlock and start the car. It’s the same thing I give to valets.
cmdrlinux,
It’s not misinformation. some people really were stuck without the keys because they don’t carry them. Perhaps you can blame them for trusting that the phone is all they needed. It’s still legit to criticize online dependencies for functionality that should be local.
I haven’t found definitive information from Telsa themselves, the manual does not suggest any failure modes. I’d like to read more about it if anyone can provide more information. I’ve heard a theory about why some people got locked out though: users who leave the app open can still have valid cached credentials whereas users who close/restart the app loose their credentials have have to re-authenticate via tesla servers. I still think a robust solution needs to be independent of tesla’s servers.
Yeah. Had no trouble driving my car during the “outage” The unlocking is done via bluetooth or the nfc cards. There are even mechanical failsafes if all that fails.
I can’t believe a couple of morons forgetting their card keys was turned into something newsworthy. Journalism keeps circling the bottom of the barrel…
javiercero1,
You can certainly blame the users for being naive about technology always working, but at the same time I think it is important to cover this in the news if for no other reason than to educate those very same users who you call morons. Normal people don’t think about failure modes before things fail. Even the companies that should know better can fail to address failure modes until they are publicly embarrassed by them, Bad news is a good motivator to make things better 🙂
A couple of idiots forgetting their card keys, out of thousands upon thousands of users, is just that: a couple of people who forgot their card keys.
It happens every day, on any type of vehicle, home, whatever that has a key.
User error is not the fault of the system.
It’s a non issue. It’s something as long as keys themselves.
javiercero1,
The system isn’t totally without fault though because it failed when it didn’t have to. I expect we can all agree this kind of failure is technically avoidable by engineering a fallback mode. For a cheap IoT device, maybe a company can get away with server down = app failure, that’s just what you get with a cheap device. But when you’re talking about a premium car, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect the official app to be more robust.
Of course you can argue users are idiots for not carrying extra keys with them, but that doesn’t mean the app should fail like it does. Clearly Tesla can make the app more reliable, it’s my opinion that they should. If you want to disagree with my opinion, then so be it.
But the system didn’t fail.
The bluetooth opening still works just fine, and so did the NFC cards. At no point I was even aware there was at outage, and I own a Tesla. And neither did any of my colleagues.
People forgetting their keys happens all the time every day. Correlating people forgetting their keys with the outage of unrelated services is trying to find a causation that doesn’t exist. It’s shitty journalism.
Always on connectivity on Teslas is not a requirement, it’s an optional feature.
javiercero1,
The phone unlocking did fail for many though and Tesla themselves have acknowledged it. Not for nothing, but you can only fault users to a point. At some point we need to acknowledge that the technology has let people down. Here’s a thread full of Tesla owners experiencing problems with bluetooth and the app that predate this recent outage. Many people report bluetooth unlocking not working for them until they open the app.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/car-won%E2%80%99t-unlock-unless-app-is-open.202642/
I get that you’re a fan of Tesla, but you’re being way over sensitive to legit criticism. Is having a reliable car app going to be the deciding factor for people buying a Tesla? No probably not, but don’t you agree it would be a nice touch and cause less frustration? Yea it probably would.
I’m a Tesla owner.
Any product that sells hundreds of thousands of units is bound to experience a percentage of failures. That is true for Tesla, normal combustion engine cars, or something as basic as a yo-yo.
A few customers not being able to unlock their cars using their phone, for a few moments, is a minor inconvenience in the big scheme of things. Especially when the phone unlocking is a convenience, and there are other ways to unlock the car.
Again, Teslas can be operated perfectly with zero connectivity.
javiercero1,
I gathered that 🙂
Actually I’ve been reading more user experiences and I am learning that Tesla’s phone key problems aren’t new at all, they’re pervasive with threads upon threads of owners experiencing reliability problems long before the recent global outage.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a28904319/tesla-owners-locked-out-of-cars-phone-key/
They should have been carrying a second key, but honestly it does not give the sense that Tesla’s phone key app is production ready.
This supports what I had read earlier, the model 3 app will use cached credentials for bluetooth as long as the user doesn’t close the app, but once they do they can be forced to reauthenticate with tesla’s servers,
Here’s an owner who says model 3 phone key worked fine for two months before becoming erratic and now it’s unreliable having to reboot frequently. Note all the people reporting similar experiences in the comments for both iphone and android…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNliWmAdsew
Yes, everyone should have backup keys, but nevertheless it’s kind of surprising that Tesla has allowed these reliability problems to go unfixed for so many people and for so long.
…and so on.
Do you think it’s unreasonable for them to expect phone key to be more reliable? And speaking of backup key cards, the following user found his backup key cards stopped working.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/key-card-s-not-working-to-unlock-car.235852/
After calling roadside assistance Tesla pushed a software update that fixed his problem, but it’s another example of how. things go awry when your smart car gets updates pushed to it over the air.
LMAO. Oh, my god you’re pathological.
javiercero1,
To be fair,, you haven’t explicitly disagreed with my opinion that tesla should engineer the app more robust. You keep saying it’s not a problem for owners, but there’s a preponderance of evidence that many owners have been negatively affected. I honestly don’t get why phone keys are such a sensitive topic that we can’t talk about the problems with them. Do you just want to be contrarian to argue, is that it? I think it could be.
Nah, this is another BS argument that you have to argue for the sake of arguing. Any software is going to have some issues. Any product of which has sold a significant amount of units is going to experience discrete failures in the field.
None of that is specific to Tesla. And that still doesn’t change the fact that you literally don’t need connectivity to operate a Tesla.
But it doesn’t matter what I say. You will have to make it in your head that you won an argument, that once gain only exists in your head. So you will use something you found on the internet to make a silly claim/extrapolation.
So here we are again, the guy without a Tesla telling the Tesla owners what the ownership experience must be like…
Nope, the evidence couldn’t be clearer that it is a wide scale problem affecting many owners.
I never said it was specific to Telsa. An IoT device may have a local button too, but that does not mean owners won’t be annoyed and inconvenienced when smart features that are advertised go offline. It’s a completely legitimate gripe and god knows why you’re inventing controversy and being so overly defensive about it other than just to be disagreeable.
Personally looking forward to an electric car that I can diagnose with a simple multimeter.
Maybe so, but you’ll have to dig deep when it’s time to replace that part you just diagnosed as faulty.
Nah. By that time you’ll be able to repair it with household 14-gauge wiring from the local hardware/car-parts store. Unless, of course, you’ll be insisting on installing the Ferrari-branded magnets, carefully hand-wound by the original Italian craftsmen.
I don’t have to take my key fob out of my pocket to both unlock and start my truck. And it is a lowly gas pickup truck. When they can get electric cars reasonably close to being able to cover great distances without having to stop and recharge, I may take interest.