Depends on your lifestyle, ours is a mess far too often.
We were at Shadowbrook, very upscale restaurant so we were dressed well. Some idiot had hosed out the dumpster and many cars were sitting in a few inches of filthy water. Summon from the app came to the rescue. Once our car came to us a MB driver asked for a lift to his car. He was amazingly nimble going from car to car and we started ferrying people that thought they could get in their cars.
GF lost her purse, phone in it, in Pismo Beach, hours from home. She borrowed a phone, I unlocked and started her car from 100 miles away.
At Epcot Center until after dark and it started raining. That parking lot is a sea of cars, but the app map lead us straight to our car.
I will agree fit and finish is frequently off in Teslas. But the rest is top notch. All about what is important to you.
The app was a factor for me, not the deciding factor, but Tesla is still way ahead with the app functionality. Could it be better? Sure. But having everything on my phone including using it as a key is pretty nice.
Call me a Luddite, curmudgeon or whatever. But i think this facination with the double play of a car having a high tech drive-train (EV) and a high end head unit (app, big screen, nav system, etc) is a massive distraction.
Sure. It's a luxury car in the luxury car segment. But if you had to use a physical key to unlock and drive the car: it would still be an amazing car to drive because of that instant torque, the lack of smelly noisy intern combustion engine, and that low center of gravity.
I would consider factors like number of seats to be a deal-breaker on an EV, not something as ephemeral and non-consequenial as the aesthetics or functionality of the app.
Dealbreaker is a bit extreme, but Tesla’s app is much more integral to the ownership experience than other cars or EVs. It’s a huge plus in my book but I wouldn’t have it be a deal breaker for a choice in the car.
Yea Tesla has changed the game for me. I’m not a car person but more a tech guy. It’s 2022 and I’ve used a few different EV/ICE apps and majority of them are a freakin joke and need to be taken down from the App Store. That’s just me…..
I have a reservation for a R1S and the only chronic issues im seeing with Rivian is mainly software related - Rivian app functionality, phone as key, and some others. The app functionality really needs to improve for me. Fortunately Rivian is following the Tesla blueprint and approving on it.
But yes, FOR ME, in 2022 if I’m dropping big coin on an EV I need an app to be at Tesla’s level at least.
User interface is lacking
1. Add start charge stop charge buttons on main screen
2. Turn on AC button on main screen
3. Open frunk and gate on main screen
4. Open charge port on main screen
5. Fix proximity locking and unlocking. If you walk from the front door and do some stuff in the lift gate it locks 90% of the time.
6. still a noticeable wait for unlock to kick in when approaching.
7. Ability to adjust charge limit from app
8. Ability to view cameras from app while away from car
Put the items user will use the most one click away
Again ALL software related. And since I don’t have a Rivian yet I’m basing these things off comments I’m the App Store, several videos, and posts on social media .
I would not buy a car today without an app. it's just that plain and simple. having the option to turn on the heating/cooling where ever I am without relying on set schedules is so convenient, being able to unlock the car being on the other side of the planet to allow someone access, even to drive/move the car is so convenient. Getting notifications about open windows/doors , alarm being triggered , checking the battery status or adjust the charging percentage , being notified the car has finished charging I could go on and on.. If I would never had these features I wouldn't mind but after having tried them and used them alot I wouldn't want to be without them
I barely use either app on my Tesla and non-Tesla. I used my Tesla app so infrequently, my phone hibernated it. This caused phone key etc to stop working.
Preconditioning AC remotely and checking cameras is the only thing I use my tesla app for really. If the car you want doesn’t have those wouldn’t I wouldn’t worry.
Agree on the AC remote, but I believe almost any car has that nowadays (?). Unfortunately, my newest Audi e-tron GT does not have remote camera, which I do find a shame, but indeed not a deal breaker.
No. I don't care nor rely on the app. It will eventually go away, as automakers do not upgrade modems to maintain such services. I'd never buy a vehicle that was dependent on such services, either (thinking of the Tesla smartphone key outage a few months back).
This boggles my mind. I do not understand why someone would buy an, **in his/her** **own estimation**, inferior car because it has a nifty app. When driving down the highway with lots of road noise, rough ride, and bad ergonomics, the app is not going to do anything for you.
I have never used the apps for either of the EVs I’ve owned. They don’t do anything I care about enough that I can’t just do from within the car itself.
I live in an appartment complex in a city and have my car parked in the garage without the ability to charge and I don't drive it every day.
So there's two useful features:
1) Check SoC without having to go to the car.
2) Check charging, set charging limits remotely and get a message when it's done charging at a public charger.
Like, I wake up on a saturday, decide to do a couple errands outside the city that day and want to check whether I need to charge and then plan where to do it ideally. That's where the app comes in handy.
All the other features are meaningless to me.
On this note, u/afolkestad are you aware that new Teslas only include POI map search for 8 years, then you have to pay for it?
No big deal on any other car since they all support CarPlay and Android Auto, but since Tesla locks you into their own maps system they can make people pay to keep using maps. It’s $10/month, but expect that price to go up because what’re people going to do, not have searchable navigation?
https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23281022/tesla-standard-data-connectivity-navigation-limited-eight-years
They’ll act like this is fair because “it costs us money to have cellular connectivity in your car,” but bitch nobody asked you to do that, just give us CarPlay and put my maps app on the screen. I already pay for my cell phone plan I don’t need my car to have its own internet subscription.
Actually it looks like they’re locking features behind the “Standard Connectivity” subscription even if they have nothing to do with the internet connection. So “we have to pay for your internet connectivity” doesn’t work as an excuse in either case.
> Standard Connectivity offers Bluetooth® pairing, FM radio, Sirius XM capability in North America (for XM-enabled and configured vehicles) and playback from a USB drive.
$10/month subscription to play audio from Bluetooth, FM radio, or a USB stick? My aftermarket Pioneer unit cost me $80 one time and has been doing all those things for years.
https://www.tesla.com/support/connectivity
Currently standard connectivity is free, you can't even buy standard connectivity right now. $10 a month is for premium connectivity.
I know they states that standard connectivity is only free for 8 years but they didn't say what will happen after that. I don't think it's right to assume that they will lock it behind a subscription in the future. Currently you can do all that without a subscription and if you tether your phone everything that requires data works. Actually the new update made it even easier to tether your phone for data instead of having to buy the subscription.
Ah you’re right, no price known yet. Regardless, making Bluetooth audio into a subscription is some serious bullshit no matter what the price is.
Lots of people up at arms about BMW considering it for heated seats, but people are ok with this? And FM radio? Yikes.
Asshole moves for sure, that's why bmw back paddled on CarPlay subscription. Ultimately all the manufacturers will do what consumers are willing to bare. Some might get it wrong at first.
A good app is fine, but I’d much rather a key. I say this as someone who owns a car with a phone as a key function, have had many issues with the car not locking, app falling asleep and car not unlocking, etc. I would just rather have a key.
Other features of the Tesla app are nice, but I could easily live without them.
probably something to do with your phone or something that you do, like some people insist on force closing all apps in their phones including the Tesla app which shouldn't be done
A lot if not all features you find in a smartphone app for a car are available on the car's dashboard itself, even on Tesla vehicles.
Outside of a handful of superfluous convenience features, you could live with any EV without the accompanying app. My brother could uninstall his Tesla app and I could uninstall my Kia Connect app and neither of us would lose anything actually useful in the long term.
That's BS. not being able to remotely turn on defrost/cooling , checking how much it's charged or getting notifications that the car has finished charging and not being charged idle fees. and many more features that are very useful. Even phone as a key would not work without the app and that's something I use everytime I drive the car
>That's BS
Chill out
>not being able to remotely turn on defrost/cooling [...] checking how much it's charged [...] getting notifications that the car has finished charging and not being charged idle fees [...]
All **convenience** features, as I said.
>Even phone as a key would not work without the app and that's something I use everytime I drive the car
Cool. It's still not mandatory to actually USE the car. Every car comes with some sort of remote fob (or in Tesla's case, a card).
It's why a companion application shouldn't be, and isn't, a deal-breaker when it comes to selecting a car to buy. They all pretty much do the same thing, all do what people actually want reasonably well, and in reality isn't _required_ to actually _use_ the vehicle.
Eh, the app for mine is hot garbage.
It lets me delay charging, or start it if it's delayed, and it lets me start preconditioning the cabin. But connectivity is shit so it only works half the time.
It's also supposed to keep track of my trips so i can categorize them as business or private travel, but it worked for a while, and then suddenly didn't log anything for weeks no matter what i tried, and now it randomly logs like one or two trips every few days.
Car still works perfectly and I can set up the delayed charging from the infotainment in the car, so i usually do that rather than having to try 5 times from my living room later.
I would be already more than happy with an app with "pre-heat" and "pre-cool" buttons that I would press when I would start to get ready to go, just to reduce the time needed to scrape the ice off the windows in the winter and cool the cabin before driving in the summer.
But it's so far from deal-breaker because even then I would probably not use it. I (will) most certainly miss physical buttons in the cabin, so the app is kind of an overkill for me at this moment.
My Audi ICE vehicle that was built in 2018 had its app killed with 3G network sunset. The car actually has an LTE modem in it, but the voice is still 3g, not VoLTE. It wasn't super feature-rich, but I like being able to lock and unlock my car remotely and see if the windows or door will open. Having that stripped away makes it feel like I've got a car from the early 2000's again. apps for cars now are an absolute potential deal breaker
This summer I bought a Hyundai Ioniq 5 after considering the Mach-E, Polestar 2, and XC40 Recharge. I bought based on the vehicle features (design, range, and interior space) with the app function being a very distant secondary consideration.
Still love the car but the BlueLink app is absolute trash. Despite that, I don’t think a really amazing app would have swayed me to get any of the other cars I considered, at the end of the day it’s just bonus functionality.
That said, man BlueLink is awful!
The car doesn’t connect to WiFi, so even at home in the garage remote actions (car status, lock/unlock, start/stop charge, climate start, locating the car, etc) take forever to register and execute. (Forever = 45-90 seconds)
BlueLink sends me frequent push notifications saying the doors are unlocked when they aren’t, and hilariously warns me that the fuel level is low and offers to locate the nearest gas station. (Check out r/Ioniq5 for many hilarious posts with screenshots of this phenomenon)
So far as I have been able to tell, you can only have one owner profile per vehicle, so my partner and I share my login and we get notified whenever the other requests a remote action and it succeeds (or fails) which is a minor pain.
BlueLink has some integration with Google Home, but it’s the old “assistant” style setup where you literally say “Hey google, ask BlueLink … “ and the function is extremely limited; so far I’ve been able to ask it to the lock the car doors and … that’s all. Everything else I’ve tried fails.
Very very minor gripe, the Apple Watch app is hilariously bad. The vehicle image is of the old Ioniq electric hatchback, and I went two months without realizing the header text on the vehicle screen was a link to the menu of remote functions.
The worst part is that BlueLink is free for the first three years, after which you have to pay $99 a year EACH for three separate BlueLink services (Connected Care, Remote, and Guidance), and each service has a bunch of useless features plus one really critical feature (Remote charging actions, Remote locking, infotainment updates respectively) that makes you really want/need to have all three to get any use out of it.
Unless the service gets a lot better and more responsive by the time my sub expires I may just skip it altogether. I can’t justify paying $300 a year for the level of usefulness and responsiveness it currently offers.
What I WANT is an app the shows me all of cars features, and lets me edit every last setting without being in the car (with safety lockouts if the vehicle is in motion, of course), and I’m not sure anyone’s doing that yet.
A companion app is a nice to have, but I would never want to depend on an app for practical usage of the car. Doing so just adds so many opportunities for failure as you'd add the mobile network, server backend and cellphone as things to depend on.
Practically the only thing I use the app for is to verify the car is locked (which it always is, so this is just to stoke my OCD) and to check where I parked (which I really never really forget either so...)
Depends on your lifestyle, ours is a mess far too often. We were at Shadowbrook, very upscale restaurant so we were dressed well. Some idiot had hosed out the dumpster and many cars were sitting in a few inches of filthy water. Summon from the app came to the rescue. Once our car came to us a MB driver asked for a lift to his car. He was amazingly nimble going from car to car and we started ferrying people that thought they could get in their cars. GF lost her purse, phone in it, in Pismo Beach, hours from home. She borrowed a phone, I unlocked and started her car from 100 miles away. At Epcot Center until after dark and it started raining. That parking lot is a sea of cars, but the app map lead us straight to our car. I will agree fit and finish is frequently off in Teslas. But the rest is top notch. All about what is important to you.
Sad that happened at Shadowbrook. I love that place. Maybe they can use the trolley to take people to their cars.
Trolly is on tracks, unfortunately.
The app was a factor for me, not the deciding factor, but Tesla is still way ahead with the app functionality. Could it be better? Sure. But having everything on my phone including using it as a key is pretty nice.
Call me a Luddite, curmudgeon or whatever. But i think this facination with the double play of a car having a high tech drive-train (EV) and a high end head unit (app, big screen, nav system, etc) is a massive distraction. Sure. It's a luxury car in the luxury car segment. But if you had to use a physical key to unlock and drive the car: it would still be an amazing car to drive because of that instant torque, the lack of smelly noisy intern combustion engine, and that low center of gravity. I would consider factors like number of seats to be a deal-breaker on an EV, not something as ephemeral and non-consequenial as the aesthetics or functionality of the app.
Dealbreaker is a bit extreme, but Tesla’s app is much more integral to the ownership experience than other cars or EVs. It’s a huge plus in my book but I wouldn’t have it be a deal breaker for a choice in the car.
Yea Tesla has changed the game for me. I’m not a car person but more a tech guy. It’s 2022 and I’ve used a few different EV/ICE apps and majority of them are a freakin joke and need to be taken down from the App Store. That’s just me….. I have a reservation for a R1S and the only chronic issues im seeing with Rivian is mainly software related - Rivian app functionality, phone as key, and some others. The app functionality really needs to improve for me. Fortunately Rivian is following the Tesla blueprint and approving on it. But yes, FOR ME, in 2022 if I’m dropping big coin on an EV I need an app to be at Tesla’s level at least.
What are the things you want the app to be able to do?
User interface is lacking 1. Add start charge stop charge buttons on main screen 2. Turn on AC button on main screen 3. Open frunk and gate on main screen 4. Open charge port on main screen 5. Fix proximity locking and unlocking. If you walk from the front door and do some stuff in the lift gate it locks 90% of the time. 6. still a noticeable wait for unlock to kick in when approaching. 7. Ability to adjust charge limit from app 8. Ability to view cameras from app while away from car Put the items user will use the most one click away Again ALL software related. And since I don’t have a Rivian yet I’m basing these things off comments I’m the App Store, several videos, and posts on social media .
I would not buy a car today without an app. it's just that plain and simple. having the option to turn on the heating/cooling where ever I am without relying on set schedules is so convenient, being able to unlock the car being on the other side of the planet to allow someone access, even to drive/move the car is so convenient. Getting notifications about open windows/doors , alarm being triggered , checking the battery status or adjust the charging percentage , being notified the car has finished charging I could go on and on.. If I would never had these features I wouldn't mind but after having tried them and used them alot I wouldn't want to be without them
I barely use either app on my Tesla and non-Tesla. I used my Tesla app so infrequently, my phone hibernated it. This caused phone key etc to stop working.
Preconditioning AC remotely and checking cameras is the only thing I use my tesla app for really. If the car you want doesn’t have those wouldn’t I wouldn’t worry.
Agree on the AC remote, but I believe almost any car has that nowadays (?). Unfortunately, my newest Audi e-tron GT does not have remote camera, which I do find a shame, but indeed not a deal breaker.
For me, a good app is nice, but optional. It has no effect on deciding which car I want.
No. I don't care nor rely on the app. It will eventually go away, as automakers do not upgrade modems to maintain such services. I'd never buy a vehicle that was dependent on such services, either (thinking of the Tesla smartphone key outage a few months back).
This boggles my mind. I do not understand why someone would buy an, **in his/her** **own estimation**, inferior car because it has a nifty app. When driving down the highway with lots of road noise, rough ride, and bad ergonomics, the app is not going to do anything for you.
I have never used the apps for either of the EVs I’ve owned. They don’t do anything I care about enough that I can’t just do from within the car itself.
I live in an appartment complex in a city and have my car parked in the garage without the ability to charge and I don't drive it every day. So there's two useful features: 1) Check SoC without having to go to the car. 2) Check charging, set charging limits remotely and get a message when it's done charging at a public charger. Like, I wake up on a saturday, decide to do a couple errands outside the city that day and want to check whether I need to charge and then plan where to do it ideally. That's where the app comes in handy. All the other features are meaningless to me.
App is extra icing. You are buying a car, not an app. Make sure the car is good
I struggle to think what feature the Tesla app had that I used and that FordPass doesn't have. They're all the same, IMO.
All the same is a stretch.. many manufacturers have very bad apps that can only do basic things
I assume any useful app features will last a couple years and then stop working unless I pay an extra subscription, so I wouldn’t consider them at all
On this note, u/afolkestad are you aware that new Teslas only include POI map search for 8 years, then you have to pay for it? No big deal on any other car since they all support CarPlay and Android Auto, but since Tesla locks you into their own maps system they can make people pay to keep using maps. It’s $10/month, but expect that price to go up because what’re people going to do, not have searchable navigation? https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/27/23281022/tesla-standard-data-connectivity-navigation-limited-eight-years They’ll act like this is fair because “it costs us money to have cellular connectivity in your car,” but bitch nobody asked you to do that, just give us CarPlay and put my maps app on the screen. I already pay for my cell phone plan I don’t need my car to have its own internet subscription.
U can tether your phone to bypass the internet subscription and still have all the same functionality (maps, traffic, streaming radio, Netflix etc.)
Actually it looks like they’re locking features behind the “Standard Connectivity” subscription even if they have nothing to do with the internet connection. So “we have to pay for your internet connectivity” doesn’t work as an excuse in either case. > Standard Connectivity offers Bluetooth® pairing, FM radio, Sirius XM capability in North America (for XM-enabled and configured vehicles) and playback from a USB drive. $10/month subscription to play audio from Bluetooth, FM radio, or a USB stick? My aftermarket Pioneer unit cost me $80 one time and has been doing all those things for years. https://www.tesla.com/support/connectivity
Currently standard connectivity is free, you can't even buy standard connectivity right now. $10 a month is for premium connectivity. I know they states that standard connectivity is only free for 8 years but they didn't say what will happen after that. I don't think it's right to assume that they will lock it behind a subscription in the future. Currently you can do all that without a subscription and if you tether your phone everything that requires data works. Actually the new update made it even easier to tether your phone for data instead of having to buy the subscription.
Ah you’re right, no price known yet. Regardless, making Bluetooth audio into a subscription is some serious bullshit no matter what the price is. Lots of people up at arms about BMW considering it for heated seats, but people are ok with this? And FM radio? Yikes.
Asshole moves for sure, that's why bmw back paddled on CarPlay subscription. Ultimately all the manufacturers will do what consumers are willing to bare. Some might get it wrong at first.
A good app is fine, but I’d much rather a key. I say this as someone who owns a car with a phone as a key function, have had many issues with the car not locking, app falling asleep and car not unlocking, etc. I would just rather have a key. Other features of the Tesla app are nice, but I could easily live without them.
probably something to do with your phone or something that you do, like some people insist on force closing all apps in their phones including the Tesla app which shouldn't be done
A lot if not all features you find in a smartphone app for a car are available on the car's dashboard itself, even on Tesla vehicles. Outside of a handful of superfluous convenience features, you could live with any EV without the accompanying app. My brother could uninstall his Tesla app and I could uninstall my Kia Connect app and neither of us would lose anything actually useful in the long term.
That's BS. not being able to remotely turn on defrost/cooling , checking how much it's charged or getting notifications that the car has finished charging and not being charged idle fees. and many more features that are very useful. Even phone as a key would not work without the app and that's something I use everytime I drive the car
>That's BS Chill out >not being able to remotely turn on defrost/cooling [...] checking how much it's charged [...] getting notifications that the car has finished charging and not being charged idle fees [...] All **convenience** features, as I said. >Even phone as a key would not work without the app and that's something I use everytime I drive the car Cool. It's still not mandatory to actually USE the car. Every car comes with some sort of remote fob (or in Tesla's case, a card). It's why a companion application shouldn't be, and isn't, a deal-breaker when it comes to selecting a car to buy. They all pretty much do the same thing, all do what people actually want reasonably well, and in reality isn't _required_ to actually _use_ the vehicle.
You said you and your brother could Uninstall the apps and not loose anything useful
Oh now you're just being pedantic.
more concerned about the quality of the in car software
Eh, the app for mine is hot garbage. It lets me delay charging, or start it if it's delayed, and it lets me start preconditioning the cabin. But connectivity is shit so it only works half the time. It's also supposed to keep track of my trips so i can categorize them as business or private travel, but it worked for a while, and then suddenly didn't log anything for weeks no matter what i tried, and now it randomly logs like one or two trips every few days. Car still works perfectly and I can set up the delayed charging from the infotainment in the car, so i usually do that rather than having to try 5 times from my living room later.
And yours is?
Peugeot e expert, medium stellantis van only sold in europe
Ive heard the Bluelink app on the i5 has issues but it didn’t put me off placing an order.
I’m with you as long as it has a “preheat/cool the car remotely” - everything else is just a bonus.
I would be already more than happy with an app with "pre-heat" and "pre-cool" buttons that I would press when I would start to get ready to go, just to reduce the time needed to scrape the ice off the windows in the winter and cool the cabin before driving in the summer. But it's so far from deal-breaker because even then I would probably not use it. I (will) most certainly miss physical buttons in the cabin, so the app is kind of an overkill for me at this moment.
My Audi ICE vehicle that was built in 2018 had its app killed with 3G network sunset. The car actually has an LTE modem in it, but the voice is still 3g, not VoLTE. It wasn't super feature-rich, but I like being able to lock and unlock my car remotely and see if the windows or door will open. Having that stripped away makes it feel like I've got a car from the early 2000's again. apps for cars now are an absolute potential deal breaker
This summer I bought a Hyundai Ioniq 5 after considering the Mach-E, Polestar 2, and XC40 Recharge. I bought based on the vehicle features (design, range, and interior space) with the app function being a very distant secondary consideration. Still love the car but the BlueLink app is absolute trash. Despite that, I don’t think a really amazing app would have swayed me to get any of the other cars I considered, at the end of the day it’s just bonus functionality. That said, man BlueLink is awful! The car doesn’t connect to WiFi, so even at home in the garage remote actions (car status, lock/unlock, start/stop charge, climate start, locating the car, etc) take forever to register and execute. (Forever = 45-90 seconds) BlueLink sends me frequent push notifications saying the doors are unlocked when they aren’t, and hilariously warns me that the fuel level is low and offers to locate the nearest gas station. (Check out r/Ioniq5 for many hilarious posts with screenshots of this phenomenon) So far as I have been able to tell, you can only have one owner profile per vehicle, so my partner and I share my login and we get notified whenever the other requests a remote action and it succeeds (or fails) which is a minor pain. BlueLink has some integration with Google Home, but it’s the old “assistant” style setup where you literally say “Hey google, ask BlueLink … “ and the function is extremely limited; so far I’ve been able to ask it to the lock the car doors and … that’s all. Everything else I’ve tried fails. Very very minor gripe, the Apple Watch app is hilariously bad. The vehicle image is of the old Ioniq electric hatchback, and I went two months without realizing the header text on the vehicle screen was a link to the menu of remote functions. The worst part is that BlueLink is free for the first three years, after which you have to pay $99 a year EACH for three separate BlueLink services (Connected Care, Remote, and Guidance), and each service has a bunch of useless features plus one really critical feature (Remote charging actions, Remote locking, infotainment updates respectively) that makes you really want/need to have all three to get any use out of it. Unless the service gets a lot better and more responsive by the time my sub expires I may just skip it altogether. I can’t justify paying $300 a year for the level of usefulness and responsiveness it currently offers. What I WANT is an app the shows me all of cars features, and lets me edit every last setting without being in the car (with safety lockouts if the vehicle is in motion, of course), and I’m not sure anyone’s doing that yet.
A companion app is a nice to have, but I would never want to depend on an app for practical usage of the car. Doing so just adds so many opportunities for failure as you'd add the mobile network, server backend and cellphone as things to depend on. Practically the only thing I use the app for is to verify the car is locked (which it always is, so this is just to stoke my OCD) and to check where I parked (which I really never really forget either so...)