Tesla To Bring Waypoints To Navigation! And What About Weather Radar? Alternate Routes?

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Tesla Navigation Waypoints

One of the top feature requests from Tesla owners has long been waypoints in the navigation system. In case you’re unclear what waypoints are, this is where you enter multiple destinations on one trip in a navigation system. Here’s how Teslatino, Eli Burton, and I tried to explain and lobby for the request nearly a year ago after Elon Musk said Tesla wouldn’t add the feature (the first tweet is just his statement at the time rejecting the feature request):

No

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2019

The main reason for this request is to be able to avoid entering multiple destination rounds on road trips (for me). If I don’t want to take a straight trip but end up there, multiple waypoints allow us to just set all destinations and let the onboard nav plot the route with SCs.

— TesLatino (@TesLatino) December 26, 2019

@elonmusk we want to plan a trip that involves multiple points if interest (stops) and we want to do with within Tesla nav so battery consumption is properly accounted for.

— Eli Burton (@EliBurton_) December 26, 2019

It seems you're misunderstanding the request.

People just want to be able to input multiple destinations on one trip — e.g., grandma's house, a Blockbuster store, & Disney World.

This seems to be the #1 feature request we've seen for a long time. Pretty pls 🙏

— CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) December 27, 2019

The 2 issues:

1) don't want to mess with setting the nav for each stop on a multi-stop trip,

2) want to be sure about range/charging going from A to B to C to D, not just A to D or A to B or whatev.

Mmkay, thx

— CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) December 27, 2019

At the time, all of our lobbying seemed to be in vain.

It’s not the biggest deal. I don’t often need to plan stopping at multiple destinations on a trip. But it happens from time to time — for me and practically everyone else — and it just seems like a basic feature of a navigation system from 2004 onward. (See other Tesla owner thoughts about it here.)

Well, the good news is that we’re finally getting it!

Fine, we’ll do it already 😀

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 21, 2020

The timeline is uncertain. Even when some new feature is “coming soon,” it’s never clear what that means. On December 26 of last year, Elon tweeted that we’d soon get Disney+ in the Theater section of the Tesla infotainment system, but it’s yet to arrive. The reason for the delay is uncertain and could be related to various matters, but the take-home point is that you never know when a new feature will actually arrive until you read “and Tesla owners lived happily ever after.”

Coming soon

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 26, 2019

Alternate Routes

Another major feature request for the navigation system, and one that I think would be more useful than waypoints, is the ability to choose an alternate route on a trip. Not having this feature is quite annoying, again, because it’s been a standard feature in Google Maps since, like, 2009. Even before that, you could drag the route around to change it if you knew better than Google Maps for a portion of the trip. Even that would be a much appreciated feature in Tesla’s nav system.

Indeed. This is the other thing (more common one actually) that we still have to use Google Maps for.

(And no offense to Google Maps, which is awesome, of course. Just prefer to have these options on the giant Tesla touchscreen/nav system & not have to pull out phone. 😬😱)

— CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) December 27, 2019

As one Tesla fan pointed out last year, such a feature could also help Tesla’s navigation system to learn and become a better route planner, which will be very important if Tesla ever rolls out a robotaxi service.

Going to need some pretty bad as$ fleet route path prediction and scheduling with charging and range considerations to deploy an autonomous robo taxi network… May as well polish it for users now as agents in such a system, maybe could aid with peak supercharger use scheduling!?

— (Lightning)Ryan Fulcher (@D0li0) December 27, 2019

Weather Radar Overlay!

A third feature that I think would be hugely loved and appreciated by Tesla drivers is adding the option to overlay a weather radar on the navigation system. That would be super cool. Credit for the idea and a rad mockup goes to Jessica Meckmann:

Hi Elon, since you are in a feature approval mood 🙃, I got something for you that many agree on: Weather Radar overlayd for the map: https://t.co/lqz8zW43aU

— Jessica Meckmann 👀 (@meckimac) September 21, 2020

3 Top Tesla Navigation System Feature Requests

There are not a lot of ways that I think Tesla’s infotainment system could get massively better, but these are three of them. Waypoints and alternate routes should definitely be options, as these are basics of a good navigation system and have been for 10+ years. The radar overlay feature would be superb icing on the cake that seems to fit Tesla’s usual software leadership pattern. It would be one of the most useful features in the infotainment system, and also simply a fun one. Who doesn’t love looking at the weather radar!

Any other top ideas for Tesla nav features or other Tesla infotainment features?

Related Stories:

• Tesla Autopilot Innovation Comes From Team Of ~300 Jedi Engineers — Interview With Elon Musk
• Tesla Smart Navigation Is Brilliant (+ 3 Tips)

Tesla Will Give Drivers More Options With New Navigation Features — Patents Filed https://t.co/1n7mOBaxqB pic.twitter.com/ME7hzclIKi

— CleanTechnica (@cleantechnica) August 29, 2019

See more pieces from my Tesla Model 3 long-term review.