Tesla Holiday Update Wishlist - Charging & Safety Edition

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

As December approaches, Tesla’s highly anticipated Holiday update draws closer. Each year, this eagerly awaited software release transforms Tesla vehicles with new features and festive flair. If you’re not familiar with Tesla’s holiday updates, take a look at what Tesla has launched in the Holiday update the past few years.

While leaked features like Blind Spot Monitoring While Parked hint at thoughtful improvements, the real magic lies in the unexpected. From potential features such as the Apple Watch app to a smart assistant, the possibilities are endless.

For this chapter in our series, we’re dreaming up ways Tesla could improve the charging experience and even add some additional safety features. So let’s take a look.

Destination State of Charge

Today, navigating to a destination is pretty straightforward on your Tesla. Your vehicle will automatically let you know when and where to charge, as well as for how long. However, you’ll likely arrive at your destination at a low state of charge.

Being able to set your destination state of charge would be an absolute game-changer for ease of road-tripping. After all, the best EV to road trip in is a Tesla due to the Supercharger network. It looks like Tesla may be listening. Last week, Tesla updated their app and hinted at such a feature coming to the Tesla app. A Christmas present, maybe?

Battery Precondition Options

While Tesla automatically preconditions your battery when needed for fast charging, there are various situations where manually preconditioning the battery would be beneficial.

Currently, there is no way to precondition for third-party chargers unless you “navigate” to a nearby Supercharger. If you need to navigate to a Supercharger that’s close by, the short distance between your location and the Supercharger will also not allow enough time to warm up the battery, causing slower charging times.

In Europe, you can navigate to and precondition for Qualified Third Party Chargers, but not for unlabelled ones.

Live Activities

While we already mentioned Live Activities in the Tesla app wishlist, they’d be especially useful while Supercharging. Live Activities are useful for short-term information you want to monitor, especially if it changes often — which makes them perfect for Supercharging, especially if you want to avoid idle fees.

Vehicle-to-Load / Vehicle-to-Home Functionality

The Cybertruck introduced Tesla Power Share, Tesla’s name for Vehicle-to-Home functionality (V2H). V2H allows an EV to supply power directly to a home. By leveraging the vehicle’s battery, V2H can provide backup power during outages and reduce energy costs by using stored energy during peak rates.

Tesla Power Share integrates seamlessly with Tesla Energy products and the Tesla app. We’d love to see this functionality across the entire Tesla lineup. Recently a third party demonstrated that bidirectional charging does work on current Tesla vehicles – namely on a 2022 Model Y.

Adaptive Headlights for North America

While Europe and China have had access to the Adaptive Headlights since earlier this year, North America is still waiting. The good news is that Lars Moravy, VP of Vehicle Engineering, said that these are on their way soon.

Blind Spot Indication with Ambient Lighting

Both the 2024 Highland Model 3 Refresh and the Cybertruck already have ambient lighting features, but they don’t currently offer a practical purpose besides some eye candy. So why not integrate that ambient lighting into the Blindspot Warning system so that the left or right side of the vehicle lights up when there’s a vehicle in your blind spot? Currently, only a simple red dot lights up in the front speaker grill, and the on-screen camera will also appear with a red border when signaling.

Having the ambient lighting change colors when a vehicle is in your blind spot would be a cool use of the technology, especially since the Model Y Juniper Refresh and Models S and X are supposed to get ambient lighting as well.

Tesla’s Holiday update is expected to arrive with update 2024.44.25 in just a few short weeks. We’ll have extensive coverage of its features when it finally arrives, but in the meantime, be sure to check out our other wishlist articles:

Tesla Reveals Q1 2025 Supercharger Vote Winners, Opens Voting for Q2

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

With Q1 2025 now behind us, another round of Tesla’s Supercharger Voting has wrapped up. The previous vote took place back in December, and we now get to see which locations came out on top.

It’s been an exciting year for Supercharging, with the launch of 325kW charging for the Cybertruck and the upcoming debut of 500kW-capable V4 Superchargers. Tesla has also been rolling out several quality-of-life improvements to improve the charging experience, such as faster Supercharger data and an upcoming virtual queue system when Superchargers are full.

Let’s take a look at the Q1 2025 winners of the Supercharger Vote:

North America

🇺🇸 Lake Wales, FL

🇺🇸 Henderson, NV

🇺🇸 Clarksville, TN

🇺🇸 Roswell, NM

🇺🇸 Long Beach, CA

🇺🇸 Decatur, IL

🇺🇸 McAlester, OK

Europe

🇬🇧 Bournemouth, United Kingdom

🇮🇹 Bari, Italy

🇵🇱 Wrocław, Poland

🇨🇿 Hradec Králové, Czech Republic

Asia-Pacific

🇰🇷 Namyangju - South Korea

🇦🇺 Nicholls, Australia

Supercharger Voting Q2 2025

Another quarter means another round of Tesla's Supercharger Voting, giving Tesla owners the chance to influence where new Supercharger sites will be built. Following the Q1 2025 voting round, Tesla is now opening the polls for Q2 2025.

How to Vote

To participate in the Q2 2025 Supercharger Voting, visit the Tesla Supercharger Voting page and sign in to your Tesla account. You can vote for up to five different locations, with a limit of one vote per location, every three months. The most popular Superchargers are displayed on the leaderboard, and you can also suggest new locations for future voting cycles.

Tesla will announce the winners at the end of Q2.

Tesla Teases FSD Unsupervised, Hits 50,000 Autonomous Miles

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

We’ve known for a while now that Tesla has been using a custom build of FSD to allow its newly produced vehicles at Giga Texas and Fremont to autonomously navigate themselves from the production line to the outbound delivery lot. 

While we knew they were using a custom build of what was likely FSD Unsupervised, thanks to a recent post from Tesla AI on X, this has now been confirmed. Tesla has also confirmed it has accrued over 50,000 driverless miles, totalled from vehicles autonomously driving themselves to delivery lots.

Autonomous Driving to Loading Areas

For most of Tesla’s vehicles - that’s a 1.4-mile trip that is shared with pedestrians, cars, trucks, and construction equipment. You can see in the video that the Teslas are navigating public roadways and encountering real human drivers.

That’s great news, especially since many were wondering whether Tesla would secure the necessary approvals in time to launch their Robotaxi network in June.

Increased Confidence

Following Tesla’s post to X, Musk followed up by saying that when Tesla launches FSD Unsupervised soon, it will be the first time there will be a generalized, pure AI solution to autonomy. Tesla and several executives continue to post more content about autonomy and the Robotaxi network, leading us to believe they’re feeling confident in the June launch.

Cybertruck Too

Back when Tesla initially announced the autonomous travel of its vehicles from production to loading lots, they mentioned that the Cybertruck was the only vehicle at Giga Texas not receiving that same treatment.

Now, that’s changed - Cybertruck is now also navigating through the Cybertunnel to make its way from the factory directly to the loading docks, all on Unsupervised FSD. And that’s making us even more excited, especially because Tesla was supposed to launch an FSD Update for the Cybertruck a little while ago - but it hasn’t made it to production yet. This update is set to bring Start FSD from Park, as well as Actually Smart Summon - bringing the Cybertruck to feature parity with Tesla’s other AI4 vehicles.

Now that Tesla is confidently using a build of Unsupervised FSD to navigate the tight confines of the tunnel and park, we’re pretty sure that Tesla will likely launch the expected FSD update in the near future.

FSD Update Soon?

It’s been a while since any FSD hardware variant has received an FSD update. It appears that Tesla has been focused on Unsupervised FSD and launching FSD outside of North America.

It seems like we may get a new FSD update soon, and we don’t believe it’ll be just for the Cybertruck. Those who have the opportunity to sign up for Tesla’s new Early Access program will likely be some of the first recipients to receive the FSD update, so stay tuned.

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