Tesla Over-the-air updates

If your phone or laptop can download updates wirelessly, why can’t your car? Well, if it’s a Tesla, it can. Tesla has been offering over-the-air updates since 2017, allowing new upgrades and features to be delivered to models wirelessly without owners having to visit a dealer.

No fewer than 15 safety upgrades have been made to the Model 3 executive car in 2020, while numerous comfort, convenience and entertainment features have been improved. These upgrades range from notifications that can tell you when you’ve left your car door unlocked, to the ability to set a PIN to keep the contents of your glovebox secure, but it’s the safety improvements that really caught the eyes of our judges.

These allow Tesla’s Autopilot system to slow the car down when you reach a roundabout, for example, or bring the car to a halt if it senses you’re about to go through a red light. Elsewhere, the Model 3 can now show you more road markings, so you’re more aware of your surroundings, and it provides more options to set a cruise control speed by simply tapping an icon on its giant infotainment screen. You can even allow Tesla to view footage from inside your car in the event of an accident. Its experts can analyse this and put their learnings back into developing new safety technology.

If you want some idea of how these incremental improvements add up, Thatcham Research, which conducts crash testing in the UK on behalf of Euro NCAP, tested the Model S luxury car’s safety assistance features back in 2014 and it failed to surpass those of rivals by some margin. Today, both the Model S and Model 3 are the benchmarks for those same tests. Indeed, the Model 3 scored 94% in the driver assistance category in 2019 – a full 14% more than the next best car.