Tesla Reviews

Update: Dropping this to two stars. All of the below still stands true. I have the lovely added benefit that whenever my car goes to sleep, the widget used to display “asleep”. Now it displays an error icon and says “please open app”. This has been an ongoing issue now for months.

All in all the ability to cool/heat my vehicle, remotely open doors, honk the horn, and view where the vehicle is at at any time is amazing! Light years beyond my last car. That said, a few things I think would add a lot of benefit. 1) When setting a charge limit, let me see percentages on the lines. You guys recommend a specific percentage for extended battery life. Don’t make me guesstimate where that is. 2) allow me to either pick and choose or show more options on the widget. Currently, if I want to open the frunk I’m good; swipe right and tap widget button. If I want to open the trunk I have to open Tesla , tap controls, then open the trunk. Minor, but if I use the trunk far more than the frunk, it gets frustrating. 3) Allow me to view WiFi connection and signal strength from Tesla . I have a detached garage. I’m trying to find a better location for my router so that my car gets more than one bar of WiFi. Currently I have to move the router, walk to the car and get in, check it...rinse and repeat over and over. I may end up needing to get an extender, but Tesla would save me a lot of headache if it just exposed this data.

This is a review of the solar energy tracking part of Tesla. I don’t own a this app car. Tesla works, so I have to give it more than one star, but that’s about it. It has three major problems. First, while it has options for showing energy data on a year, month, week, or day period, when you select one of those options it brings you to the current day, week, etc. If you want to see data from 2 weeks ago, you have to view the current week, then hit the back arrow to go to the previous week, wait for it to get and display the data, and then hit the back arrow again. Repeat as necessary. Suppose I want to see the data for the summer equinox 2 years ago, I repeat these steps some 700 times?!

Second, when it is displaying e.g. the days of the month, one would think that tapping on a particular day would bring up the data for that day. Nope, it does nothing. (Granted, tap and hold will show the total generated for that day, but if I want to see the day in detail, it’s back to selecting “by day” , and stepping back day by day.)

Third, the algorithm for scaling the vertical axis is brain-dead. Here’s an example of the tic-marks chosen: baseline=0, 1st tic =182, second tic = 364, then 546, 728, and finally topping out 910! I mean really, you couldn’t have figured out to use 0, 200, 400, .. to 1000? The coders for the now-retired browser-based display could do it!

For this app energy users Tesla is confusing and a downgrade. I see what this app is trying to do with the energy destination interface and it’s slightly clearer where your energy goes now. If you click the solar, for example, you see which proportion goes to the house, grid and powerwall. That’s nice, but it could be another screen rather than replacing the old screen. Another nice upgrade is the powerwall status in SOC by time of day. I miss the energy destination page on the old version. It was instantly understandable and informative. The new one with the house takes too long to see where the little green bolt goes. Why in god’s name do you need a house picture? It adds nothing. Please take away the house and give back one of the clearest and cleanest designs in the old app. Also Tesla loses info it seems, the powerwall goes to zero SOC at some point later in the day and I know it’s not zero based on my other phone which has the old app. Please don’t take functionality away with your updates. It seems like Tesla was created by a focus group not including consumers of the info. Give us back what you took from us. Add if you want to. And fix what’s broken rather than breaking what’s working. Please give better download capability. Bulk download of detailed data. Better peak period data clarity that is downloadable.

This is an ok app when it is actually able to connect to the vehicle in that it does provide some nice features such as the ability to set the cabin temperature before a trip or check/set charging. It does generally improve the vehicle experience although Tesla ’s UI is only ok - there a lot of settings buried in a long and ugly top menu. And one key missing feature is the ability to control charging with the same granularity as the car such as changing the charge schedule.

But Tesla is very unreliable connecting to my vehicle, whether it is on WiFi or cellular. I frequently get “Waking up” messages where I have to wait minutes watching a spinning arrow for it to connect or in about 1/3 of the time results in a “Vehicle Connection Error.” I have to reboot, recycle, and most of the time it finally connects. But several times I had to go out to the vehicle and get in before Tesla finally connected - kind of stupid don’t you think for an app that is supposed to allow for remote access?

I do like having Tesla a lot and when it connects it really is a good experience overall. But I can’t in good faith give it more than a few stars because it is just so frustrating to get it to connect.

I am on a variable day-ahead hourly rate plan with my electric utility. I prefer to buy more electricity during selected hours when it is cheaper. In Illinois this is typically when wind is blowing at night, but obviously this varies from day to day. Cheaper electricity also tends to be cleaner electricity.

It would be nice if I could set two state of charge levels, a minimum charge level and a maximum charge level and have Tesla /car automatically (i.e. using a pricing arbitrage-like strategy) select the hours for charging that minimize electricity cost subject to the above charge level constraints. During cold weather, this strategy would ideally also take into account losses from battery heating.

Finally, it would be nice to have away to just heat the battery without heating the cabin. While heating the battery uses energy, it also enables regenerative braking which help to recoup some of that energy loss while greatly reducing brake wear.

this app keeps improving my driving and car management experience regularly, through Tesla. Being able to adjust and readjust the climate remotely from my phone, including individual seat heaters, defrost, cabin temp, has been great this winter. Being able to remotely open the two trunks and charging port, flash lights and horn, etc., is nice to have when you want it. Being able to schedule a service appt, control the charging sched, map out nearest superchargers, and find pretty precisely where my car is at the exact moment, is really convenient. Only issue is the time it takes to “wake up” (connect from Tesla to the car), while it is only less than a minute, takes longer than I would like. When I’m standing in my house next to the router and the car is 20 feet away, also on the router, I would think it would be almost instantaneous. Would really, really like to be able to remotely activate any/all cameras and see the view from my phone. Thanks, this app!

You took away a functioning app that provided us with useful tools to monitor our solar systems installed in 2 homes. Also had the ability to make payments. You forced us on to Tesla where only one home can be monitored, to a very limited degree. Can’t make payments. Can’t get assistance. Forced into a website, that still gives no detailed information on the system in order to make a payment. Why would you take away a great tool and replace with something that is of no benefit. If you haven’t noticed, the world runs on apps.

Update. Received an alert that the gateway wont communicated with this app. The email didn’t state which home. App and website are still no help for multiple systems, and no customer support phone number listed. Had to google search for it. 2.5 minutes through and annoying IVR to then wait on hold for a representative. 16 minutes until my call was answered. Tesla , website, communications and customer experience are terrible. The customer service agent agreed when I mentioned Tesla and website. Pretty sad when your own employees acknowledge the problem. Went from a company I enjoyed doing business with as Solar City to a complete disappointment with this app.

I find the entire experience, end to end, with this app to be consistently horrible. First, getting an appointment early enough is not possible when I had an emergency with my tire almost being broken. Then the day before my appointment the service center said they can’t do loaners so basically I was on my own without a car. Ther is no service center number to call and talk to someone because they want all of it to be done via Tesla . I’m a digital business app development person so I know the modern channel preferences of apps. When I got to the service center, the front door was locked so Tesla scheduling isn’t synced with facility location times. Then I entered through the work area and every mechanic saw me and just ignored that there is a customer in the work area. Then I went to one and told them I had an appointment. Finally someone came and took the car. They sent me a message the car is serviced and I should pay but Tesla messages take forever to load and when I click view to pay it gives me an error each time, so I can’t pay. I called them again but there is no way to pay via phone. I have no idea how I will pay them.

My experience has been great with no occurrences of issues that others leaving bad reviews mention. I think it is very device and location specific, meaning phone make/model, cell tower connectivity between phone and vehicle, WiFi/internet service (if involved in the connection equation), and potentially needing to reset the mobile phone altogether. Specifically, I have never had username/password/logout issues, so it can’t be Tesla is poor or my experience would be consistent with theirs.

Coming from a Camry XLE and the Toyota Entune app (which is a total joke and worthless piece of crap that literally makes you type username/password EVERY time and no option of TouchID) the this app app is used DAILY almost hourly, whereas I would open Entune once a month to see if it had actually become useful or even worked yet. (It never became useful or worked).

For the one user who mentioned they wish it would have Siri or other automation, just buy the “RemoteS” app in Tesla Store. You can create Siri shortcuts and literally tell your car what to do.

this app shouldn’t be the sole developer of mobile app enhancements, just core functions. They just need to provide the capability and documentation for developers to access core functions, which they have done and are available on the web. Learn development or start a campaign to acquire the development. Otherwise use the feature request function in the car.

Please correct this last update. Power failure notifications are not being sent. This is critical in our area due to the many outages we are experiencing. Power failures updates are now being received since I upgraded to iOS 15. The power failure history is once again in Tesla and no need to reinstall it since the iOS upgrade. If iOS was required it should had been advised so as not to upgrade to Tesla version. The history of power failures is still only to one year back whereas on the old app it was since the initial installation of the Powerwall, if needed be please provide an option to be stored in the phone as an option to downloading the data manually. I also agree with some users that the font used to report the Energy is too small. The graphing also should allow to add the sun, house, powerwall or grid without having to click on a button, it should be as it was on the prior version. Last the screen background could be allowed to be set to a lighter color.

I used to love checking the status of my solar panels and PowerWall with Tesla. Now it’s just a big, confusing mess with less functionality. For example, the graph used to let me select which components (solar, battery, grid and house) that I want to see. Now I can only see a single component, or else exclude a single component. And while I appreciate that I can download data (several years after requesting this feature), all I get are a few data points corresponding to the graph that’s on the screen. There is apparently no way to get what I want, which is all of the actual raw data, down to a one-minute resolution. And by the way, when “Storm Watch” came out, I thought, “Wow, this is fantastic,” except it didn’t actually work when we had power outages from storms. Storm detection is all false-positives and false-negatives. During our worst storm, when the grid was down for 10 hours, the battery started out at 20% and only lasted for a few hours with a minimum number of appliances turned on. It’s unfortunate that that Tesla has turned to crap, because the underlying tech is so good.

For a while there wasn't a charging tab to see how much your charging cost at home and with the new update they have the feature to select your time of use plan with your electric company and it automatically sets the schedule for the days of week and even the season which is really nice! Now I can see how much it costs per night to charge at home during off-peak hours. Although I wish there was more detailed controls. For example Tesla tells me that my window is open, but doesnt say which window. The Tessie app can do this though, which is what I use more often than the official this app app. I can only set scheduled departure for "all-week" or "weekdays" there is no "custom" tab to set the days where you actually work...

It’s shameful that this application never works. A company like this app, which has done and accomplished so much in our modern times, now cannot fix the commuication issue that this application is having. Everytime I launch the application, it unsuccessfully tries to communicate with my 2018 until I get the void message “Network Time Out.” The application would only work when I launch it while on Wi-Fi. And on the other hand, a third party application, this app Stats, works fine and connects to the vehicle without a single glitch everytime, which leads me to believe that the issue lies in the this app apllication, not the AT&T service. And I’m not the only one with this problem. Multiple other this app owners are experiencing the same problem. One last thing: when I purchased my Model 3, the application worked perfect up until a recent application update made in the first half of 2020. What goods can you find in the convenient Summons feature, or the climate control, etc., if the application does not work? It is really about time for this app to solve this problem.

I use Tesla strictly for solar power and power wall. The interface used to be useful, I could easily see power consumption and production etc, but now it doesn’t allow me to go off grid without going into the back yard and messing with the switch. That’s the problem with computer programmers they like to change things for the sake of change. I am a very old computer programmer and the cardinal rule is if it works don’t fix it. Change and improvement should happen in the background. The UI should gradually evolve. To use a car analogy do whatever you want under the hood, but the steering wheel and the brake better be where I expect it.
Is it more intuitive ? No it’s not. Does it work
Any better? No it’s worse. Taking the clean simple interface and making it look busy is not an improvement. Main screens should be simple , options should be clear. Details should be accessible only when sought for. No one wants to look at a power plant schematic unless they drill down to it.

Please roll back Solar portion. Users:Do not update. Cool update for vehicles. Poor for home energy management. The newest update needs to be rolled back. It was always easy to know the system status at a glance. Going on or off grid was simple. Now, your phone has to be paired with your power walls. If the new home page states “Go on Grid”, one would assume they are off grid. Um….maybe. Been operating the same system for two years seamlessly. Today, Tesla allowed my batteries to get drained during off peak hours. Guess what was left for peak. I have not paid for peak since day one. Why? I’m guessing it’s this app’s idea for their virtual grid. The new home page puts the opt in option in your face. And, somehow my battery reserve was changed to 0%. Nice! I get their goal. PG&E gives you pennies for your excess energy. In turn they sell it at a huge profit as “Green Energy”. Their justification is infrastructure cost. Yeah, like magic fairies installed and maintains my system for free. this app wants a cut of that profit margin under the guise “Help support California’s grid”. Yeah yeah…let’s go with that! Rant over!

When I plug in the car to charge I no longer get a message saying charging scheduled for 11 PM or whatever time you set up for. it just says charging stopped. Therefore when I go to sleep I have no way of verifying that my charge is set and ready to go like i used to. Also, I no longer get an error message that the cord is plugged in incorrectly or there is a fault or whatever might impede my charge that is going to start a couple of hours after I go to sleep. The old app gave that info which you could check at a glance before retiring for the night. This is quite a downgrade from your previous version which gave all of that information and more. If you’re going to start annoying people with updates that take away actually useful features in the real world, you’re just like every other tech company. Now just to be sure I don’t wake up in the morning without a church I have to manually start my charger at about 10 PM before I go to bed confirm that it’s charging correctly and then go to sleep charging when electricity still very expensive rather than starting later in the middle of the night. Thanks this app.

I had an early build model 3 with all the options including FSD. Years later I found myself wanting a Model Y for its slightly larger interior space and the AWD. But FSD- which is just software, as the car is capable, is non-transferable. Even though I already purchased the upgrade when it was only a few grand, I lose it with the old car and they want me to pay $10K to have it again. Any other car I could remove an accessory and put it on my new car. Any other software I could uninstall from my old computer and bring to my new computer. Imagine having to re-purchase every app on your phone at 5x the original cost with every new phone release. Now they’re limiting me to 80% charge limits at select super chargers when I’m on long haul road trips- the entire reason I got a Long Range was to have the distance. Not cool. Don’t get me started on build quality. this app lost its soul in its attempts to finally turn a profit. this app is ahead now but as soon as a legacy brand has a better or similar EV to this app, I’m out.

Whomever is doing the updates is ruining the this app experience in every way possible. First it was the solar app with the picture of a house which is not needed.I like to see the destination of the electricity flowing to where it is needed. The old version was clean and simple. Easy to read data not like the new version. It doesn’t make sense at all the way it is displayed. The update to my car is another story. It really makes it unsafe by not having the most used icons on the Home Screen. Now it is hidden behind 2 taps to get what I want. That means less time with my eyes on the road. Whoever is doing this need to be demoted or fired because it is making me so disillusioned with the brand that I will not be recommending your product to anyone anymore. I have been a staunch supporter of everything this app. When I’m working(utility co) I always recommend this app powerwall and model 3’s to customers I am servicing. This is the power of word of mouth advertising this app was built on. Sadly it is being broken bit by bit with every update. Please do something before it’s too late.

I’m a new Model 3 owner, and have been using Tesla for a 8 days. I like the convenience of the effortless lock/unlock functionality the Phone Key option offers. The ability to control so many of the car’s features remotely is great too. But something seems a bit off with Tesla’s background activity.

At default settings in iOS 11, it used 11% of my iPhone 7’s very healthy battery (97% max charge from new, replaced by Apple earlier this year) in the first 10 hours I had the car, and there were almost 2 hours of background activity that day. And that was with spending 4 of those 10 hours in the car.

I’ve since turned off Background App Refresh, and it’s helped decrease the battery usage to about 4-5% per day. I use it a few times per day for keyless entry and maybe once per day for remote climate adjustment. But even with that setting change, it’s still had 8+ more hours of background activity in the past 7 days.

I’ve written to this app Support to try and get details of the heavy battery use and reason for so much background activity, but haven’t heard back yet. Tesla does offer a location tracking feature for the car, so I would guess that’s the main drain? It also offers notifications for car-related alerts. Hopefully they can optimize things further, as other than the heavy battery drain Tesla is great!

Sadly, our Model 3 got backed into while parked overnight, and unfortunately, that was the one night we forgot to activate Sentry Mode. Fortunately, the other driver left a note but that could have easily resulted in a hit and run with no info on the driver.

It would be super helpful to have a preference that would allow Sentry Mode to auto-engage whenever parked, possibly with an additional setting that would only do it away from home (for those with garages). Maybe also a preference that it would disengage below a certain battery threshold? In the event of an accident, you’d very likely record the plates of the car that hit you. 5/7/19 edit: thank you for adding this feature!!!

However, here is a suggestion that could take things to the next level and prevent some mishaps altogether. Since you are already monitoring surroundings with the low-power ultrasonics, could you not also distinguish a car moving too close while parked (a more uniform motion pattern than a pedestrian)? If a car gets too close, a quick honk of the this app’s horn could provide enough warning for the other driver to realize just how close they are. Not sure if that’s technically feasible but, if so, that would be huge! Accident averted!

Thanks for the consideration and appreciate all the great work you devs at this app do!

As a I write this, key fobs are sold out. They are a bandaid fix to this issue anyway that I am guessing can be fixed with software.

ISSUE: Currently I cannot walk up to my locked Model 3 with my iPhone X in my back left pocket and open my driver’s door. I’ve reset both car and phone. I mean it could be my phone, sure, but I played around with it and watched Tesla ’s phone key signal bars go from 1-2-3 bars at various points of distance and in/out of my back pocket. Looks like 3 bars of signal is necessary to unlock. I have 3 bars holding the phone even half-way out of my pocket standing next to the door in my natural position, but the signal level drops to 2 bars once my phone is 100% in my back left pocket like I normally wear it. If I rotate my body 90 degrees to the right so that the phone is literally closer to the car it gets 3 in the pocket and allows the unlock. All the band-aid fixes of awkwardly turning my body, unlocking with Tesla manually before I reach the car, buying a key fob, or wearing my phone in my front pocket are unrealistic IMO. I’m an average athletic male at 5’11” and 180lbs, not a corpulent hambeast.

PROPOSAL: allow either calibration of the key signal strength to be 3 bars at a given distance / situation OR allow a setting in Tesla / car to allow unlocking the car with less than 3 bars. “Phone key unlock distance: near, medium, or far” seems intuitive.

Thanks for reading.

I like Tesla , but there is room for improvement:

1-When I turn on the heat, all seat heaters come on. I don’t usually want any but the driver’s seat. Recommend only automatically turning on the heaters that were on in the previous session.
2-Same as (1) but with the defrosters
3-The widget needs a ton of work. It takes too long to load. My Model 3 is currently showing as a Model S. I can’t configure which controls are most important to me.
4-Please expand and advertise all of the available Siri commands and give the user the option to enable unlocking the car without being in Tesla .
5-I should be able to configure which controls are on Tesla ’s front page. Alternatively, allow for display of more controls on the front page or tapping the car image itself to unlock/open the trunk/frunk/charge port.
6-Set the charge slider to 5% detents. Who needs to set their charge in 1% intervals?
7-Change frunk/trunk confirmation to a long press (e.g. 3 seconds) instead of the confirmation pop up
8-Tesla is slow to connect to the car regardless of how the car or iOS device is connected.
9-I should have an option to override all summon safety stops.
10-Not really iOS feedback, but please open your API to more integrations possibilities (e.g. SmartThings).

Thank you for continuing to make the this app experience the best possible!

In the world we live in today, who doesn’t love having the control of everything right at your finger tips? Love that I can use Tesla to control the garage door as well, it saves from having to install a wireless connection for it and use a different app for that feature, so it’s awesome that you can do that. What I would like to see is the option to add or remove the widgets on the main screen, right now it has the A/C, frunk, and locking widget. Being able to add the trunk as an option, or turn on sentry mode since it’s not a default, or the garage control, would be an awesome update. Also I want to be able to access the additional camera views, after all, I did just spend over 50k on the car, you’d think I be able to use fully what I purchased

When I purchased our Powerwall I specifically asked whether there was a way to be informed when our utility power failed and we were running off the Powerwall. I was told Tesla could be set up to send a text message/email when utility power was interrupted. Now our Powerwall is installed, I discover that this alert system has been removed “because there were problems with it”.

I live in a remote rural area with no other dwellings in sight. With no indication that utility power has failed I have no way of knowing that I should reduce my power consumption when this occurs. So I rapidly deplete my Powerwall whenever there’s a power outage! Yes, Tesla indicates when the power has failed, but I can’t keep my eyes glued to Tesla all the time to see if the utility power is off!

With a text and/or email alert, I’d be able to turn off my water heater and other high-power consuming devices and just run essential devices for days. Instead, my Powerwall is exhausted in a few hours!

This is simply not acceptable, and not what I was told would be the case when I purchased the unit.

All you smart this app engineers, please make it a high priority to fix this essential need for your otherwise cool product/service. If you can land two Falcon Heavyset simultaneously, you can fix this!

Until you do, my Powerwall is of minimal use.

Please help.

Despite the information here on the compatibility, Tesla does not work with my iPad. It would be nice to have an actual iPad app to use, just in case my -home is not available. I do use Tesla daily. this app keeps updating and adding new features. A few features would be nice to have, first the ability to set the level for charging from Tesla , not just the limit and ability to start and stop charging. Viewing the most recent air pressure for the car would be great as well, instead of having to show it by switching it on the display. Showing the percentage of charge as well as the rated or ideal miles would be helpful. I've thought of a lot of features that could easily be implemented in Tesla , but are not.

I bought a new this app Model 3 three days ago. I connected it to 110 V power at my office, went into the building, and Tesla would not lock the car. I had valuable objects in the car. After 10 failed attempts to lock the car, Tesla told me the door was open. I went to the car and opened and firmly closed each door, went back into the building, and again could not lock the car over and over again. It turned out to have been the truck that was open. Unlike the doors, the trunk can present a perfectly plausible appearance of being closed without in fact being closed. Why mislead me by telling me that the door is open when it is not true? It is not such a complicated notion: if Tesla is refusing to perform an act it has been asked to perform, tell me why, the true reason why, not a false reason why.

DO NOT LEAVE YOUR PETS OR PASSENGERS IN THE CAR WITH THE “CLIMATE KEEPER” OR DOG MODE ON! I set my car to maintain a temperature of 60 degrees using the car’s touchscreen. When I was about ten minutes away from getting back into the car, I upped the temperature to 68 degrees and made sure the seat and steering wheel were heating up. When I got into the car, the interior was 66, according to the touchscreen, which indicates to me that the car might have been heating up to 68. The steering wheel and seat were ice cold, so they were not warming up. When I started to drive, the temperature was mysteriously set back to 60, as I had set it for climate keeper, not when I had most recently set it to 68 via Tesla . The car is not obeying what I set in Tesla , no matter when I try to preheat it, and hasn’t followed what I set in Tesla for heating (car, steering wheel, seat) since the past few software updates. Give me back the functionality I thought I was getting when I bought this car!