According to this forum post [0], the Tesla Navigation data is 5-8 GB in size. This is a large file to download over a cellular network, and I can understand why Tesla/Carriers would prefer people download this file over wifi or wired internet.
Apple has had a related download policy: they won't let you download major iOS updates over cellular data, and require wifi or USB data cable to install them. I believe Apple does this as a result of carrier pressure, however I don't think Apple has publicly stated this (Apple rarely does so).
A lot of people seem to forget that cellular bandwidth is finite, and that wireless congestion is a real problem today.
Is Tesla not big enough to negotiate off-peak discounts? Do US carriers not support that type of thing? It's such an obvious solution I can't believe they don't do it.
When I visited Sri Lanka, $8 at the airport got me a SIM card and something like 16 GB of data. ~4GB during the day, and the rest at night. So blatantly rational.
Wireless congestion is not a problem at 3am. I've worked at an ISP long enough to know what consumer access patterns look like.
>Apple has had a related policy: they won't let you download major iOS updates over cellular data, and require wifi or USB data cable to install them. I believe this is a result of carrier lobbying, however I don't think there is an official reason (Apple rarely has one).
Common sense really. Apple would get two complaints if they didn't do this. 1. From people who blew through their data allowances pulling the update. 2. From the networks and everyone else once the network bogs down every update. (Apple doesn't stage rollout like most manufacturers do)
Related: The 11.2 update had carrier specific modifications made to wifi calling. On networks where congestion was a bigger problem, wifi calling gets preferred. On networks with coverage issues, but less congestion... cellular is preferred if it's there.
>A lot of people seem to forget that cellular bandwidth is finite, and that wireless congestion is a real problem today.
They also seem to think Tesla would get some sort of a deal from the networks for all this bulk data.
Even on iOS's App Store, you cannot download apps over 150MB using cellular. I thought this was actually mandated by the carriers (who were concerned in early days that app downloads would overly congest their network) and wouldn't be surprised if Tesla has similar restrictions as part of their carrier agreement.
EDIT: Weird, I thought when I first hit reply, there was no mention of App Store, but I see we're on the same page with this one :)
I wonder why is it that large maps update? Is it for whole US maps? If it is, I imagine to just update my local region instead of many other regions or I could choose to update manually myself later. Basically why not break the update to many smaller pieces and let user update the most important.
It seems like there's a really obvious solution to this problem: why not just allow people to download this update, put it on a USB stick, then plug the USB into the car? For people that don't have/don't want to buy USB sticks, they could have some pre-loaded ones available at service centers.
No need to park at a Starbucks, have your customers tether their cars to their phones, or overload the wifi at the service centers.
Installing over WiFi is something that doesn't require a user guide beyond 'connect your car to the WiFi' which anyone with a smart phone is used to.
Entrusting non-technical people with installing via USB sticks is not something I'd want to do. As others pointed out Windows allows it for installing their OS, but installing Map updates should be orders of magnitude simpler.
If the customers are going to go to the service centres to get the stick - better just to offer them a coffee there whilst the updates are downloaded over the service WiFi.
>Why not just allow people to download this update, put it on a USB stick, then plug the USB into the car?
I guess a few things:
1- If you give USB to end users to plug it to their cars you eventually going to need to provide some support service for it. If someone has a Tesla that does not make that person who understands about using computers. Tesla cars are still cars.
2- Teslas are cars, again. You can travel to another country with your car. You can put that car in a ship and use it on another continent. (insert Falcon Heavy joke here) As Tesla, the company you still need to provide updates to those intercontinental Teslas.
Here‘s a better idea: install this „server“ (you‘ll probably not need much more than a Raspberry Pi sized machine) into every Supercharger. Car will have to park there anyway for some significant time, there‘s electricity already and it‘s Tesla property anyway so they don‘t come across as being cheap. Elon, are you listening? :D
If you think about it, even that's expensive. You need a computer, server, software, installation, times 1200 Supercharger stations (dealerships aren't available in a lot of places).
Tesla has only 200k cars on the road. 5 gigabytes of data download off peak is pennies.
"We don't want to pay for it, please make Starbucks pay instead. kthanxbye" ???
Can this possibly be the official corporate position?
There should be entire 2 semester course in biz school about how to scale without ending up with corporate policies creeping in that are so mind-bendingly stupid that everyone starts wondering if the company leadership is a bunch of 12-year-olds laughing behind a gym somewhere.
If Tesla supported carplay/android auto it wouldn't be a problem, but no, gotta re-invent car navigation.
I've read some people saying it would be impossible because the infotainment system controls everything. Well every car I've been in with carplay also has the native car ui to control stuff so I don't get the problem. Of course it's about control over the whole experience. Can't be giving consumers a choice.
Edit: I say this as someone that plans on eventually buying a model s. I’m just waiting for the technology to mature.
The suggestion to park at Starbucks is skeezy, but otherwise the response sounds entirely reasonable. Having many cars pull multi-gigabyte updates over LTE would be prohibitively expensive.
What Tesla should do is allow people to receive updates at a service center (or at superchargers), either manually from a technician or just automatically in the background with a known Tesla WiFi network that the car knows how to connect to when at a service center. Hell, the service center could even keep cached copies of the downloads locally to speed things up.
It was the only way to get a decent wifi signal :-p
But it’s kind of a shock they don’t offer updates via USB. Throw a digital signature on the download to help against unsigned code, encrypt the contents and restrict access to the download to verified owners if they are worried about offering a download of maps they brought from someone else and have the key delivered to the car via LTE via their already inplace vpn the cars use to phone home to the mothership.
Car manufacturers have been offering updates to built in gps devices for years via CD/DVD/USB to none connected cars, kind of a shock that Tesla don’t offer this upgrade method.
The second comment seems pretty reasonable: Set your phone as a wifi hotspot for the car to use.
I don't think it's unreasonable for them to balk at spending $2mil to push a huge data blob out over a free connection that was probably originally scoped purely for small (<100mb) firmware updates.
The Tesla employee ought to have suggested the WiFi hotspot idea. Telling the guy to leech off a Starbucks connection is just weird. And the explanation about "imagining" how much an LTE update costs Tesla is also weird.
Why not offer optional LTE map updates for an additional fee? I guess I hadn't thought much about how Tesla pushes software and map updates. WiFi makes sense but I would assume it doesn't work well for some people. I know my WiFi signal in my garage and driveway is quite poor due to the architecture of my house and I assume the large number of WiFi networks in my neighbourhood.
And as far as the reasoning for why they can't offer it at their service centre -- seems like an issue easily solved by a QoS feature on a router.
> The second comment seems pretty reasonable: Set your phone as a wifi hotspot for the car to use.
You can't trigger the update, so you have to leave your phone with the car (remember that the whole problem here is that parking is too remote from living space to share wifi) for an extended period of time and hope for the update to trigger.
And, from the comment on the article page by the author, they've tried that: I have put my phone in hotspot mode for literally 5 days, left it in one car, and connected both cars (at home, just one car at work because my wife works somewhere else) to my iPhone hotspot, leaving me completely phone-less except for once-a-day charging sessions at home. Despite this, because there is NO way to trigger a “guaranteed” maps/nav update (sounds like Elon will only allow triggering firmware updates), I might need to be without my phone for weeks on end.
Obviously they wouldn’t have to spend that much. Right now the majority of their customers get these updates via WiFi - so it would just be a matter of finding out which vehicles were sufficiently out of date and only sending them the data.
From the comments in the link, it seems like map downloads are triggered randomly. Someone left their phone in their car for 5 days but it didn’t sync.
Tesla is still more consumer-friendly in this respect than any other car manufacturer I know of. You have to pay for map updates in most other cars... it's not cheap either.
What most posters here are missing is that you cannot trigger the update in your Tesla so most suggested workarounds will not work. Including the suggested parking outside a Starbucks.
I don't know in the US, but here in Italy a small 3G/4G modem (capable of creating a Wi-Fi hotspot) costed me[1] less than 50 Euro, complete with the SIM in it, and then the data plan is if I recall correctly something like 8 Euro month for 3 or 4 GB of traffic, and 12-15 for 8-10 GB, but it is not a "subscription" you just "recharge" with a given amount of money and it gets the monthly fee from that (if used).
The underground garage may be a problem, but if the car is parked outside, it should work fine.
[1] at least lat year, I had the telephone/DSL cable cut and to provide remporarily the connectivity of the office quickly put together a Wi-Fi based on that, that we call in jargon "soapbar", the one I got was a Huawei E5330:
https://www.eprice.it/router-wifi-HUAWEI/d-5730696
But why would you have to buy a 4G router just so that your car can download an update? Sounds needlessly complicated to me. I honestly don't understand why they can't factor in download prices into the price of the car. Having contracts with networks to allow large downloads during certain time windows would probably be close to free (no additional capacity needed in the middle of the night) and would provide a much better experience for the user.
Similar to your expensive data plan, Tesla also has to pay for the LTE connection in your vehicle, thus we cannot offer this option.
Oh come on, even my AU$40 prepaid sim includes gigabytes per month.
And which carrier wouldn’t jump at the chance to advertise “We partner with Telsa to provide you unmetered firmware and maps updates, simple set your phone as a wifi hotspot and connect your Tesla to take advantage of this offer”.
Telsa might still pay a fee, but it would be a fraction of what you or I would pay for the same amount of quota.
> Lastly, there are currently 200,000 vehicles that could hypothetically receive LTE map updates. Imagining it would cost Tesla $10 minimum per map update via LTE, which would cost approximately $2,000,000; you can quickly see why this would be problematic for our future as a business.
It would be moot if you just charged a premium for LTE maps updates for the subset of customers who need it. Heck, price it right, and it'll probably be profitable, and also make owners happier.
Why aren't they downloading the updates while charging? Shouldn't be too much effort to either install WiFi at the superchargers or run data over the charge cabling. Then maybe just update the "local" map data around the supercharger (the next charger along the route will update the next area; no need to update unused maps).
Also I'm wondering why updates are generally fat blobs instead of deltas.
First, the comments about USB - I can fully understand them. USB has been repeatedly shown to be an insecure medium (pretty much by design, it relies on the device being honest about its intentions) and Tesla is probably justified in not exposing a USB port to the customer. At the same time, it's been proven that Tesla's infotainment (eugh, I hate that word!) system runs Ubuntu, so they should really be publishing the source code for it anyway.
Second, if this very large download is really a problem that even service centres can't offer it without affecting their own operational bandwidth, why not install a caching proxy in each service centre? Hardly expensive hardware, an RPi with a USB disk would be enough, then the connected cars can download from the cache instead of straight from Tesla each time? Multiple cars in parallel would not be a problem.
As a side note, yes, pushing large downloads over cellular connections are expensive. It suits the carriers to have this model; in the UK, when smartphones first came out, unlimited-data plans were common, but very quickly vanished from the market when the carriers realised how many people would take the offer literally. Even now, the carrier I'm on offers unlimited data on the phone, but has a cap on tethering (it's Android, so I have no idea how it's detectable, but...). Compared to the likes of Apple, who have uncountable millions of devices and could easily lean on carriers to make OTA OS updates free, Tesla are comparatively small fries with less than a million cars on the road. They're mostly propped up by investor funding at the moment and are not even turning a profit (last I heard) yet. Not a good position to be arguing with carriers from.
And if Tesla are complaining about their own bandwidth distributing these large updates, they obviously need to talk to someone like Akamai and get their updates onto a CDN.
[+] [-] tristanj|8 years ago|reply
Apple has had a related download policy: they won't let you download major iOS updates over cellular data, and require wifi or USB data cable to install them. I believe Apple does this as a result of carrier pressure, however I don't think Apple has publicly stated this (Apple rarely does so).
A lot of people seem to forget that cellular bandwidth is finite, and that wireless congestion is a real problem today.
[0] https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/firmware-update-2018...
[+] [-] oasisbob|8 years ago|reply
When I visited Sri Lanka, $8 at the airport got me a SIM card and something like 16 GB of data. ~4GB during the day, and the rest at night. So blatantly rational.
Wireless congestion is not a problem at 3am. I've worked at an ISP long enough to know what consumer access patterns look like.
[+] [-] joecool1029|8 years ago|reply
Common sense really. Apple would get two complaints if they didn't do this. 1. From people who blew through their data allowances pulling the update. 2. From the networks and everyone else once the network bogs down every update. (Apple doesn't stage rollout like most manufacturers do)
Related: The 11.2 update had carrier specific modifications made to wifi calling. On networks where congestion was a bigger problem, wifi calling gets preferred. On networks with coverage issues, but less congestion... cellular is preferred if it's there.
>A lot of people seem to forget that cellular bandwidth is finite, and that wireless congestion is a real problem today.
They also seem to think Tesla would get some sort of a deal from the networks for all this bulk data.
[+] [-] siwatanejo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baud147258|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jd20|8 years ago|reply
EDIT: Weird, I thought when I first hit reply, there was no mention of App Store, but I see we're on the same page with this one :)
[+] [-] a012|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thathappened|8 years ago|reply
Everyone knows a interrupted update isn't good and downloading several times isn't good either.
[+] [-] kylec|8 years ago|reply
No need to park at a Starbucks, have your customers tether their cars to their phones, or overload the wifi at the service centers.
[+] [-] icc97|8 years ago|reply
Entrusting non-technical people with installing via USB sticks is not something I'd want to do. As others pointed out Windows allows it for installing their OS, but installing Map updates should be orders of magnitude simpler.
If the customers are going to go to the service centres to get the stick - better just to offer them a coffee there whilst the updates are downloaded over the service WiFi.
[+] [-] flukus|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bnastic|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] argestes|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hatsunearu|8 years ago|reply
I mean FFS, downloads through a local server over WiFi is gonna be way faster than downloading through the internet over WiFi anyways!
And the servers are cheap, not to mention they probably already have spare computing power at a dealership to get this working!
[+] [-] endymi0n|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rospaya|8 years ago|reply
Tesla has only 200k cars on the road. 5 gigabytes of data download off peak is pennies.
[+] [-] marcc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freerobby|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|8 years ago|reply
Can this possibly be the official corporate position?
There should be entire 2 semester course in biz school about how to scale without ending up with corporate policies creeping in that are so mind-bendingly stupid that everyone starts wondering if the company leadership is a bunch of 12-year-olds laughing behind a gym somewhere.
[+] [-] tristanj|8 years ago|reply
Why is it a problem if Tesla does the same thing?
[+] [-] dawnerd|8 years ago|reply
I've read some people saying it would be impossible because the infotainment system controls everything. Well every car I've been in with carplay also has the native car ui to control stuff so I don't get the problem. Of course it's about control over the whole experience. Can't be giving consumers a choice.
Edit: I say this as someone that plans on eventually buying a model s. I’m just waiting for the technology to mature.
[+] [-] mantas|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kelnos|8 years ago|reply
What Tesla should do is allow people to receive updates at a service center (or at superchargers), either manually from a technician or just automatically in the background with a known Tesla WiFi network that the car knows how to connect to when at a service center. Hell, the service center could even keep cached copies of the downloads locally to speed things up.
[+] [-] oferzelig|8 years ago|reply
And they're the ones who have a Roadster roaming in space.
[+] [-] Crosseye_Jack|8 years ago|reply
It was the only way to get a decent wifi signal :-p
But it’s kind of a shock they don’t offer updates via USB. Throw a digital signature on the download to help against unsigned code, encrypt the contents and restrict access to the download to verified owners if they are worried about offering a download of maps they brought from someone else and have the key delivered to the car via LTE via their already inplace vpn the cars use to phone home to the mothership.
Car manufacturers have been offering updates to built in gps devices for years via CD/DVD/USB to none connected cars, kind of a shock that Tesla don’t offer this upgrade method.
[+] [-] taneq|8 years ago|reply
I don't think it's unreasonable for them to balk at spending $2mil to push a huge data blob out over a free connection that was probably originally scoped purely for small (<100mb) firmware updates.
[+] [-] brandon272|8 years ago|reply
Why not offer optional LTE map updates for an additional fee? I guess I hadn't thought much about how Tesla pushes software and map updates. WiFi makes sense but I would assume it doesn't work well for some people. I know my WiFi signal in my garage and driveway is quite poor due to the architecture of my house and I assume the large number of WiFi networks in my neighbourhood.
And as far as the reasoning for why they can't offer it at their service centre -- seems like an issue easily solved by a QoS feature on a router.
[+] [-] FireBeyond|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
You can't trigger the update, so you have to leave your phone with the car (remember that the whole problem here is that parking is too remote from living space to share wifi) for an extended period of time and hope for the update to trigger.
And, from the comment on the article page by the author, they've tried that: I have put my phone in hotspot mode for literally 5 days, left it in one car, and connected both cars (at home, just one car at work because my wife works somewhere else) to my iPhone hotspot, leaving me completely phone-less except for once-a-day charging sessions at home. Despite this, because there is NO way to trigger a “guaranteed” maps/nav update (sounds like Elon will only allow triggering firmware updates), I might need to be without my phone for weeks on end.
[+] [-] kelnage|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babaganoosh89|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arthurcolle|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DKnoll|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] omarforgotpwd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmonsen|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rightnow|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jaclaz|8 years ago|reply
The underground garage may be a problem, but if the car is parked outside, it should work fine.
[1] at least lat year, I had the telephone/DSL cable cut and to provide remporarily the connectivity of the office quickly put together a Wi-Fi based on that, that we call in jargon "soapbar", the one I got was a Huawei E5330: https://www.eprice.it/router-wifi-HUAWEI/d-5730696
[+] [-] dx034|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasonlingx|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoubleMalt|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roflchoppa|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TheSpiceIsLife|8 years ago|reply
Similar to your expensive data plan, Tesla also has to pay for the LTE connection in your vehicle, thus we cannot offer this option.
Oh come on, even my AU$40 prepaid sim includes gigabytes per month.
And which carrier wouldn’t jump at the chance to advertise “We partner with Telsa to provide you unmetered firmware and maps updates, simple set your phone as a wifi hotspot and connect your Tesla to take advantage of this offer”.
Telsa might still pay a fee, but it would be a fraction of what you or I would pay for the same amount of quota.
[+] [-] schappim|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mansilladev|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonwriter|8 years ago|reply
It would be moot if you just charged a premium for LTE maps updates for the subset of customers who need it. Heck, price it right, and it'll probably be profitable, and also make owners happier.
[+] [-] ComSubVie|8 years ago|reply
Also I'm wondering why updates are generally fat blobs instead of deltas.
[+] [-] gargravarr|8 years ago|reply
First, the comments about USB - I can fully understand them. USB has been repeatedly shown to be an insecure medium (pretty much by design, it relies on the device being honest about its intentions) and Tesla is probably justified in not exposing a USB port to the customer. At the same time, it's been proven that Tesla's infotainment (eugh, I hate that word!) system runs Ubuntu, so they should really be publishing the source code for it anyway.
Second, if this very large download is really a problem that even service centres can't offer it without affecting their own operational bandwidth, why not install a caching proxy in each service centre? Hardly expensive hardware, an RPi with a USB disk would be enough, then the connected cars can download from the cache instead of straight from Tesla each time? Multiple cars in parallel would not be a problem.
As a side note, yes, pushing large downloads over cellular connections are expensive. It suits the carriers to have this model; in the UK, when smartphones first came out, unlimited-data plans were common, but very quickly vanished from the market when the carriers realised how many people would take the offer literally. Even now, the carrier I'm on offers unlimited data on the phone, but has a cap on tethering (it's Android, so I have no idea how it's detectable, but...). Compared to the likes of Apple, who have uncountable millions of devices and could easily lean on carriers to make OTA OS updates free, Tesla are comparatively small fries with less than a million cars on the road. They're mostly propped up by investor funding at the moment and are not even turning a profit (last I heard) yet. Not a good position to be arguing with carriers from.
And if Tesla are complaining about their own bandwidth distributing these large updates, they obviously need to talk to someone like Akamai and get their updates onto a CDN.
[+] [-] nsb1|8 years ago|reply
Don't like USB? Allow the Tesla app to grab the map updates and then dump them to the car next time it connects.
If they're trying to grab the file in one massive 8GB chunk, stop it and grab smaller bits as they can.
Hell, bittorrent it from other Teslas while you're sitting in traffic.