Confirmed: Tesla adds Apple Music to vehicles in update

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 on November 20, 2022. Aaron discovered that Apple Music was included in one of Tesla’s vehicles.

At the expo, Tesla installed the interior of the new Model S, complete with center console, steering wheel and infotainment system so attendees could experience the yoke steering wheel and its lightning-fast processing for maps. , games and entertainment.

The “vehicle” was running a developer version of Tesla’s operating system with build number 2022.40.50, and that’s where Apple Music was found.

Tesla is known for dropping Easter eggs and hints of upcoming features in its software, and the fact that this vehicle is running a developer version with Apple Music seems to have been intentional. We first assumed Apple Music was coming when an icon was spotted at Zoom’s conference where they showcased their video conferencing running in Teslas.

According to the vehicle software menu, the vehicle VIN has been set to ‘P3TERS3N1P000BUCK.

The integration

Tesla will integrate Apple Music into its music player, instead of running an Apple Music app, which has both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, the user interface will be consistent and similar to Tesla’s other music offerings, and it should also support Tesla’s voice commands. However, this may mean that not all features of Apple Music are available.

Spatial audio

Apple recently announced that Apple Music will support Spatial Audio in select 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 unclear if Tesla implements support for spatial audio or lossless audio in their Apple Music implementation, but we can be limited to basic functionality. Tesla currently supports High Quality Audio with TIDAL.

Release date

There’s no official release date for Apple Music, but the wait shouldn’t be long. Tesla is highly anticipated to 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 custom light shows, a new user interface, a customizable launcher, the addition of Blind Spot Camera and more. This year’s holiday update is also expected to include a variety of new features.

Apple Music, which surpassed 100 million songs in October, is one of the latest major streaming services to be added to Tesla vehicles. Currently, Tesla offers Spotify, TIDAL, Slacker Radio, TuneIn and SiriusXM (S/X model only). To stream music through any of these services, you must subscribe to Tesla’s Premium Connectivity for $9.99/month.

In an ironic twist, Tesla’s growing popularity has helped a repair shop that’s been around for more than a century. Speaking at General Motors Investor Day, company chairman Mark Reuss said, “This is a growing business for us. I have to say, it’s a new business,” according to Barrons. He was referring to servicing Teslas at GM facilities. The automaker, which has been around since 1908, has repaired more than 11,000 Teslas since 2021 in the United States.

While not happy to lose 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 increased production, putting more of its vehicles in demand on the road; however, it takes much longer to build facilities and train employees to maintain these vehicles.

More Teslas will need service

Recently, internal documents showed that the company would introduce a process for the recovered Tesla to be recertified and allowed to return to the Supercharger network. This can increase the number of Teslas to work on. Service improvements have been on Tesla’s radar for some time. Last year, Musk said the company was accelerating service center openings to meet surging demand for the product.

Musk was service-oriented

In September, Elon Musk said he was focused on improving service. A Twitter user complained that a recent service appointment was canceled on short notice. Musk replied: Note that I personally spend a lot of time advancing the Tesla service to make it great. 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 is no penalty when the company cancels with a short notice. prior notice. Musk tweeted: You’re right, we should credit Tesla owners $100 if we change appointments with less than 24 hours notice. Must be reciprocal. On June 4, 2022, he tweeted: Working on Tesla North American service. The goal is for 2/3 of cars to receive same day service, with no waiting.

But since those tweets, Musk has been paying a lot of attention to running his new business – Twitter. It’s unclear how long he’ll be using Twitter or when all his attention will return to Tesla and improving the service.

Although other facilities have opened, many Tesla owners clearly find it more convenient to drive to the neighborhood GM dealership. This ironic twist may provide some short-term relief. Still, Tesla must continue to build and staff more service centers to keep owners happy and persuade potential buyers to consider the electric car pioneer when buying their next vehicle.

Tesla has updated its Safety Score feature to version 1.2, which adds night driving as a factor, among other things.

Since launching the Safety Score feature, Tesla has made a handful of improvements. Version 1.2, however, is the biggest feature update yet. This update will hopefully address a number of concerns that drivers previously had regarding how scoring was calculated.

Tesla uses the Predicted Crash Formula (PCF) to calculate all of the above factors. This formula predicts the number of car accidents that may occur per 1 million kilometers driven.

This new version 1.2 adds features such as a visualization of your journey (without location data to protect privacy), Late Night Driving and an increased grace period from three to five seconds.

Here is a list of changes to the Secure Score:

• Provides a visualization of your journey, in timeline form, to show when specific events that impacted your Safety Score occurred. To protect your privacy, no location data is provided.

• Added night driving as a new safety factor. More time spent driving at night will result in a lower safety score.

• Increased the grace period after disengaging the autopilot from 3 to 5 seconds.

• Updated hard braking and hard cornering safety factors to count event count instead of event duration.

• Updated forward collision warning rate safety factor to calculate the rate of warnings per 1,000 miles flown without using autopilot.

• Updated Safety Score to use the mile-weighted average of Safety Scores from the last 30 days, ignoring miles flown on Autopilot.

One of the biggest updates in version 1.2 is the addition of Late Night Driving. Tesla notes in its blog post that “Night driving is defined as the number of seconds you spend driving at night (10:00 p.m. – 4:00 a.m.) divided by the total number of seconds you spend driving during the day.” Although Late Night Driving is capped at 29.3% of your total score.

The reason Tesla added this as a safety factor is that driving at night can be more dangerous due to reduced visibility, fatigue, and distractions.

According to the National Safety Council, most fatal accidents occur between 4 p.m. and 11:59 p.m., with Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays being the most frequent accident days.

Tesla’s new ride visualization feature in version 1.2 is also a welcome improvement. Previously, drivers did not receive detailed feedback on their trips. Instead, they just received an adjusted score. The trip visualization will show drivers when their trip started, when the autopilot was activated/deactivated, the time of the violation (if applicable) and when the trip ended.

This information will hopefully allow drivers to reflect on each drive and correct any aggressive driving in order to receive the full autonomous 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 are subscribed to by scrolling down the Security Score screen.

These safety score improvements come at the same time as the launch of Tesla Insurance in Minnesota.