By Lennon Cihak
After many years of waiting and anticipation, Tesla is finally adding Apple Music to its cars.
Aaron Cash shared photos via Twitter of Tesla’s new exhibit at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles, which opened November 20, 2022. Aaron found that Apple Music was included in one of Tesla’s vehicles.
At the exhibit, Tesla has the interior of the new Model S set up, complete with a center console, steering wheel and infotainment system so that attendees can experience the yoke steering wheel and its blazing-fast processing for maps, games, and entertainment.
The ‘vehicle’ was running a developer version of Tesla’s OS with version number 2022.40.50, and this is where Apple Music was found.
Tesla’s notorious for leaving Easter eggs and hints about upcoming features in their software, and having this vehicle run a developer version with Apple Music appears to have been intentional. We first speculated that Apple Music was coming when an icon was spotted during Zoom’s conference in which they showcased that their video conference software would soon be available in Teslas.
According to the software menu in the vehicle, the vehicle’s VIN was set to ‘VIN P3TERS3N1P000BUCK.
Tesla will be integrating Apple Music into their msuic player, instead of actually running an Apple Music app, which has both, positives and negatives. On the positive side, the UI will be consistent and similar to Tesla’s other music offerings, and its expected to support Tesla’s voice commands. However, it could mean that some Apple Music features may not be available.
Spatial Audio
Apple recently announced that Apple Music would support Spatial Audio in some vehicles. In addition to Spatial Audio, Apple Music also supports lossless audio for a variety of music. Apple describes these features as creating an immersive audio experience that produces “true multidimensional sound and clarity.”
It’s not clear whether Tesla would implement Spatial Audio or lossless audio support when they release Apple Music later this year, but it’s probably unlikely. Tesla currently supports high-quality audio with TIDAL.
Release Date
There is no official release date for Apple Music, but the wait should not be long. It’s highly anticipated that Tesla will add Apple Music with this year’s holiday update which is expected later next month.
Last year Tesla released a holiday update that included the ability to create your custom light shows, a new UI, a customizable launcher, the blind spot camera and more. This year’s holiday update is expected to include a bunch of new features as well.
Apple Music, which surpassed 100 million songs back in October, is one of the last major streaming services to be added to Tesla’s vehicles. Currently, Tesla offers Spotify, TIDAL, Slacker Radio, TuneIn, and SiriusXM (Model S/X only). To stream music through any of these services you’ll need to be subscribed to Tesla’s Premium Connectivity for $9.99/mo.
By Kevin Armstrong
In an ironic twist, Tesla’s soaring popularity has helped a repair shop that’s been around for over a century. During General Motors Investor Day, the company’s President, Mark Reuss, said, “That’s a growing business for us. I gotta say it’s a new business,” according to Barrons. He was referring to servicing Teslas at GM facilities. The car company, which has been around since 1908, has repaired more than 11,000 Teslas since 2021 in the United States.
While not happy to be losing the business on the service side, Tesla must be relieved that its owners have access to repairs at a company that has thousands of service centers across the country. Tesla has increased production, getting more of its in-demand vehicles on the road; however, it takes much longer to have facilities built and employees trained to service these vehicles.
More Teslas Will Need Service
Recently, internal documents showed that the company was going to introduce a process allowing salvaged Tesla to be recertified and allowed back on the Supercharger grid. That may increase the number of Teslas that need to be worked on. Improvements to service have been on Tesla’s radar for some time. Last year, Musk said that the company was expediting service center openings to keep up with the exploding demand for the product.
Musk Was Focused on Service
In September, Elon Musk said that he was focused on improving service. A Twitter user complained about a recent service appointment being canceled on short notice. Musk responded: Note, I am putting a lot of time personally into advancing Tesla service to make it awesome. Hopefully, this is starting to be felt by Tesla owners.
The user also pointed out that Tesla can charge $100 for canceling an appointment with less than 24 hours’ notice, but there was no penalty when the company cancels with short notice. Musk tweeted: You’re right, we should credit Tesla owners $100 if we change appointments with less than 24 hours notice. Should be reciprocal. On June 4, 2022, he tweeted: Working on Tesla North American service. Goal is 2/3 of cars receive same-day service, no wait.
But since those tweets, Musk has had a lot of attention taken to running his new company – Twitter. It’s unclear how long he will be running Twitter or when his full attention will return to Tesla and improving service.
While more facilities have opened, many Tesla owners are clearly finding it more convenient to go to the neighborhood GM dealership. This ironic twist may provide some short-term relief. Still, Tesla must continue building and staffing more service centers to keep owners happy and persuade prospective buyers to consider the electric car pioneer when purchasing their next vehicle.
By Lennon Cihak
Tesla has updated its Safety Score feature to version 1.2, which adds late-night driving as a factor, among other things.
Since the Safety Score feature launched, Tesla has had a handful of improvements. Version 1.2, however, is the function’s biggest update yet. This update will hopefully address a number of the concerns drivers were having before about how the score was calculated.
Tesla uses the Predicted Collision Formula (PCF) to calculate all of the above factors. This formula predicts how many car accidents may happen per 1 million miles driven.
This new version 1.2 adds features like a visualization of your trip (without location data to protect privacy), Late Night Driving and an increased grace period from three to five seconds.
Here is a list of the changes to Safety Score:
- Provided a visualization of your trip, as a timeline, to show when specific events that impacted your Safety Score occurred. To protect your privacy, no location data is provided.
- Added Late Night Driving as a new Safety Factor. More time spent driving at night will lead to a lower Safety Score.
- Increased grace period after Autopilot disengages from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.
- Updated hard braking and aggressive turning Safety Factors to count the number of events instead of the duration of events.
- Updated Forward Collision Warning rate Safety Factor to calculate the rate of warnings per 1,000 miles driven while not using Autopilot.
- Updated Safety Score to use the miles-weighted average of the last 30 day’s Safety Scores, ignoring any miles driven on Autopilot.
One of the biggest upgrades to version 1.2 is the addition of Late Night Driving. Tesla notes in their blog post that, “Late Night Driving is defined as the number of seconds you spend driving at night (10pm – 4am) divided by the number of seconds you spend driving total in the day.” Although Late Night Driving is capped at 29.3% of your total score.
The reason Tesla has added this as a safety factor is that driving at night can be more dangerous due to reduced visibility, tiredness, and distractions.
According to the National Safety Council, most fatal accidents occur between 4pm and 11:59pm, with Friday, Saturday, and Sunday being the most frequent accident days.
Tesla’s new trip visualization feature in version 1.2 is also a welcomed improvement. Previously, drivers were not given detailed feedback about their drives. Instead, they were just given an adjusted score. Trip visualization will show drivers when their trip started, when Autopilot was engaged/disengaged, the time of the infraction (if any), and when the trip ended.
These insights will hopefully allow drivers to reflect on each drive and correct any aggressive driving in order to receive Full Self-Driving beta.
Although Tesla has launched Safety Score v1.2, some drivers will remain enrolled in the original version. You can see which version you’re enrolled in by scrolling to the bottom of the Safety Score screen.
These Safety Score improvements come at the same time Tesla Insurance launches in Minnesota.
