Maybe I never had the right luxury brand car, but I still see it as such.
If I want to have an app for my car, I’m my opinion that car failed me to provide with a simple, convenient driving experience.
I want to get in the car, check if it’s charged / filled up enough, check for errors (as a routine, but there shouldn’t be any), and drive.
If I need to change anything (AC, light, volume) I should be able to do it without having to take my eyes off the road.
What features do you like so much that you consider them “invaluable”?
> I want to get in the car,
I don't want to have to get in the car to do any of this. I'm able to get the climate control started in the car by saying out loud "Hey Siri, warm up car" (a shortcut I set up exposed by the Tesla app). The location is always up-to-date so if my wife is driving the kids in it, I can see their current location and ETA. I want to be able to open the door without unlocking the car manually. I want to be able to close the trunk remotely if I carried in a load of groceries. Etc.
None of this is some kind of alien technology that Tesla invented, but rather the vast majority of legacy car manufacturer apps are just total garbage piles that were outsourced to some low-bidder somewhere. It shouldn't be that hard.
E.g. if I want to turn on the seat and wheel heaters, I click on it, and then I need to wait 3 seconds to see if it actually turned them on. Or maybe they were already on, and my click turned them off instead.
The service chat section is entirely useless, and was probably written by somebody drinking bong water. And you _have_ to use it. Tesla even sends you freaking text messages with just a link to the app instead of actual text of the updates.
And I once spent 20 minutes trying to find how I can remove a guest driver from my account. Turns out that there's a small gray button "Manage Drivers" at the very bottom of the screen, past the odometer data.
Sorry. But Tesla is as shitty as other automakers. Or even shittier, because other automakers don't force me to talk with their service centers solely through their crapps.
If you want to unlock a Kia with the app, first you need to pay $15/month, and then you need to press and hold for one second the unlock button, after which you have a 30-50% chance of the unlock request going through. To let you know that it went through, you will receive an email. It's the most user-hostile app I still have on my phone.
So no, Tesla is not as shitty as other automakers. The bar is so much lower than you can imagine.
How important are these things for you? If the automatic trunk motor broke, how much would you be willing to pay to fix it? What is the value difference for you to be able to heat up the car from outside the car?
My questions point towards some variation of my central question: why does any of those things matter to you in a car? The primary purpose of a car is to get me places, everything else is optional. Is it because all the cars are equally sufficient for getting you places or so you actually value remotely controlling your car higher than the cars ability to drive you places?
For myself all of those gimmicks are just more complication that can break. I value a car that is fun to drive and with minimal abstraction. It sounds like you value maximal abstraction, and that's quite odd to me. I wish to understand your viewpoint.
As for battery charge level, I don't know why the various charger apps can't read that info off the car as it charges, but I'm sure there's some incredibly dumb reason for that.
In the summer, it gets closer to “gimmick” territory, but there are also totally times when interior surfaces of the car were too hot to touch, and that affects driving in its own right if you can’t grab the steering wheel.
Even with gloves on it can be quite cold to remove the all the ice from windows. Or you sit in the cold car for 5 minutes waiting for it to defrost on it's own.
And yes, if your climate control is broken I would pay to fix it.
Edit: When you share a car and have no dedicated parking spot the location information can also be interesting.
I see these extra features as similar to a garage door opener. It is convenient and I'd be willing to pay to fix it if it ever broke
I have my car on a schedule and it automatically heats up, turns on the seat heaters and defrosts the windshield. By the time I leave the house I have seither a snuggly warm car or pre cooled car. That is a huge time saver for me. One annoying part on this car is the fact that the LED headlights don‘t defrost. It sounds like a real first world problem but when it’s real cold outside and the car warms up etc I need to manually scrape the ice from the headlights. I would pay some money to get this „fixed“…
Ie. The owner has owned the car for multiple years and has never touched the touchscreen even once.
Across decades, I've heard of many cardiac events from shoveling the driveway, but absolutely zero from scraping ice off a car windshield. This correlates to the vast difference in effort required by each action — scooping, lifting and moving tons of snow, vs scraping at a few ounces of ice (which is even easier if you let the car run a few minutes with the windshield defrost on).
Now, if we had car (not trucks setup for plowing) that could automatically clear the driveway, that would be a must-have feature in areas with winter climates...
I'd say most people do want to hear it. The anti-tesla crowd is very loud, but very small. As are most movements borne of emotion and not logic.
The Tesla (like any EV I’ve driven) is also fun to drive, but I’d trade away the instant torque for the other features if you made me choose.
> Pre-heating an EV cabin before departing
Cars have been doing this for a years now with a keyfob. But I suppose over network/cell gives you greater range.
> Turning charging on and off via lets you take advantage of low electricity rates.
I would have thought that'd be a feature of the charger, not the car, but not an EV owner so maybe I'm just wrong here. That does make more sense for an app, but also sounds like a feature that could work fine without one too.
Useful if you're charging in the parking lot at your work, or at a mall or whatever.