Firmware
Tesla Version 8.0 Media Player: Pros and Cons
Following our recent post highlighting the latest features in Tesla Firmware 8.0, we’re back to take a closer look at the pros and cons with its new Media Player.
The Good
SWITCHING MEDIA
My favorite feature with the new Media Player is the ability to search for music while still playing your current song. This works in two ways. There’s now a bar for Favorites and Recent which allows you to quickly toggle to each respective list of song selections.
New streaming interface
You can swipe left, or right, on the lower bar and pick the next item to play without swapping screens or hiding the current one. The interface is clean and quick.
The other option is to minimize the current played song by swiping downwards and docking it towards the bottom bar. The effect is responsive and natural.
New TuneIn interface
Along with these features to allow for quicker music selection, you can also pick your audio source from the top navigation bar. Users have the ability to choose between Radio, Streaming, Tune In, and beyond.
SEARCHING FOR MEDIA
What Tesla calls the “Browse View” is an all-in-one search that allows you to find music matching your search criteria, in all categories. Here we are searching for Tesla podcasts.
Searching for Tesla podcasts!
In addition to making the search function more accessible, the feature leads to better discovery for various content types. It’ll search for everything except media store on your USB device.
Beyond the robust search capability, I really like how Tesla organized the information by placing them into categories (ie. Favorites, Top Stations). This makes finding a specific category of content quick and intuitive.
THE LITTLE THINGS
There are a number of smaller improvements which were also nice to see. For example, the adjustment for fade and balance is now one popup instead of the awkward tabbed popup from before.
The new organization for Podcasts is a great improvement, although I find Podcasts to be available on my phone long before they turn up on TuneIn. And for that reason I tend not to use TuneIn for Podcasts.
There really are dozens of small improvements in the Tesla Media Player that improve the overall user experience. Little things like a graphic for thumbs up/down makes if feel more familiar.
The Bad
CLUTTERED INTERFACE
Being able to pick my next selection while still seeing and playing my current song is a nice option when I need to find something new, but I find the extra content on the screen, all the time, to be distracting. I usually stick to a playlist until I get tired of it so I don’t need to see those choices all the time.
It would be nice to have an option to only show the currently playing song, hiding or minimizing the quick selections until I ask for them with a quick tap on the screen.
ODD SELECTIONS
In addition to cluttering the interface, the options displayed are poorly organized. It looks like someone sorted them in the order the media types appear in the menu.
With this approach you get your AM/FM favorites first, then your streaming media favorites etc. While I have AM/FM favorites I rarely listen to them as coverage is poor where I live. So why should I always be presented a list of AM/FM favorites while my songs are playing? I’m never going to choose them.
Tesla’s release notes speaks about putting your favorite stations front and center, but they’re missing the mark in my opinion.
Why didn’t Tesla default to only showing the favorites from the type of media currently playing — so if you’re playing streaming music, they would only show favorites from streaming music, etc. That would make a lot more sense and lead to a better user experience.
On every major software release from Tesla, I get the impression that the software is tested on the bench by software engineers without any practical real-world use. And those owners who are part of the super-secret beta testing group a provide adequate feedback or test enough things for them.
SONG SKIPPING
The entertainment experience is all about playing the content. You can put as fancy an interface on it as you want, but if you mess up playing the content you’ve missed the ball. 8.0 does not play content as well as 7.1 did.
My #1 complaint on the entire 8.0 release is the way streaming media fails to resume properly if one were to leave and then return to the car. It seems to happen 100% of the time and the song ends about 30 to 20 seconds short of the actual end of the song.
In other words, you get back in the car, the song resumes (a wonderful feature they’ve had for a long time), plays for a bit then ends abruptly. That’s super-annoying and everyone who rides with you will notice and comment on it.
Tesla had a similar problem like this in the past and fixed it many revisions ago. How this made it through their testing is a mystery and a disappointment.
USB USE
The USB player has never been a challenge for Tesla. While I’m not in the group of people looking for advanced support of FLAC etc, I do expect that basic things like a USB drive name with spaces in it to render normally, but it doesn’t:
USB interface with poor parsing
We’re back to some really basic testing. Something like this shouldn’t have made it through their testing. It would appear that the USB ports have not been revised much. You’re also still unable to favorite songs, playlists, folders or anything on the USB drive.
Summary
Overall, I like the direction Tesla is heading with the new 8.0 media player. They’ve modernized the interface, added some missing elements and provided new and intuitive ways to access all the various types of media.
Though the new media player is still buggy, and needs to be refined by time and use, Tesla has been faithful in providing continual updates for all Model S and Model X vehicles, and even “classic” Model S owners like myself who are benefitting from the new enhancements. Deeply grateful.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Tesla announced its Spring 2026 software update, and it’s the most feature-dense seasonal release the company has put out. The update covers twelve named changes spanning FSD, voice AI, safety lighting, dashcam storage, and pet display customization, among other things.
The centerpiece for owners with AI4 hardware is a redesigned Self-Driving app. The new interface lets owners subscribe to Full Self-Driving with a single tap and view ongoing FSD usage stats directly in the vehicle.
Grok gets its biggest in-car upgrade yet. The update adds a “Hey Grok” hands-free wake word along with location-based reminders, so a driver can now say “remind me to pick up groceries when I get home” without touching the screen. Grok first arrived in vehicles in July 2025, but each update has pushed it closer to genuine daily utility. Musk framed the broader vision clearly at Davos in January, saying Tesla is “really moving into a future that is based on autonomy.”
On safety, the update introduces enhanced blind spot warning lights that integrate directly with the cabin’s ambient lighting, building on the blind spot door warning that arrived in update 2026.8.
Dog Mode has been renamed Pet Mode and now lets owners choose a dog, cat, or hedgehog icon and add their pet’s name to the display.
Dashcam retention now extends up to 24 hours, up from the previous one-hour rolling loop, with a permanent save option for any clip. Weather maps now show rain and snow with better color differentiation and include the past hour of precipitation data along the route.
Tesla has now established a clear rhythm of two major OTA pushes per year. As with last year’s Spring update, that cycle started taking shape in 2025 with adaptive headlights and trunk customization. The 2025 Holiday Update then added Grok to the vehicle for the first time. This Spring follows that structure: the Holiday update introduces new architecture, and the Spring update broadens it across the fleet.
Two notable features still did not make it. IFTTT automations, which launched in China earlier this year, were held back from this North American release for unknown reasons, and Apple CarPlay remains absent, reportedly still delayed by iOS 26 and Apple Maps compatibility issues.
Below is the full list of feature updates released by Tesla.
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 13, 2026
It appears that Tesla may be preparing to roll out some subscription-based services soon. Based on the observations of a Wales-based Model 3 owner who performed some reverse-engineering on the Tesla mobile app, it seems that the electric car maker has added a new “Subscribe” option beside the “Buy” option within the “Upgrades” tab, at least behind the scenes.
A screenshot of the new option was posted in the r/TeslaMotors subreddit, and while the Tesla owner in question, u/Callump01, admitted that the screenshot looks like something that could be easily fabricated, he did submit proof of his reverse-engineering to the community’s moderators. The moderators of the r/TeslaMotors subreddit confirmed the legitimacy of the Model 3 owner’s work, further suggesting that subscription options may indeed be coming to Tesla owners soon.
Did some reverse engineering on the app and Tesla looks to be preparing for subscriptions? from r/teslamotors
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite has been heavily speculated to be offered as a subscription option, similar to the company’s Premium Connectivity feature. And back in April, noted Tesla hacker @greentheonly stated that the company’s vehicles already had the source codes for a pay-as-you-go subscription model. The Tesla hacker suggested then that Tesla would likely release such a feature by the end of the year — something that Elon Musk also suggested in the first-quarter earnings call. “I think we will offer Full Self-Driving as a subscription service, but it will be probably towards the end of this year,” Musk stated.
While the signs for an upcoming FSD subscription option seem to be getting more and more prominent as the year approaches its final quarter, the details for such a feature are still quite slim. Pricing for FSD subscriptions, for example, have not been teased by Elon Musk yet, though he has stated on Twitter that purchasing the suite upfront would be more worth it in the long term. References to the feature in the vehicles’ source code, and now in the Tesla mobile app, also listed no references to pricing.
The idea of FSD subscriptions could prove quite popular among electric car owners, especially since it would allow budget-conscious customers to make the most out of the company’s driver-assist and self-driving systems without committing to the features’ full price. The current price of the Full Self-Driving suite is no joke, after all, being listed at $8,000 on top of a vehicle’s cost. By offering subscriptions to features like Navigate on Autopilot with automatic lane changes, owners could gain access to advanced functions only as they are needed.
Elon Musk, for his part, has explained that ultimately, he still believes that purchasing the Full Self-Driving suite outright provides the most value to customers, as it is an investment that would pay off in the future. “I should say, it will still make sense to buy FSD as an option as in our view, buying FSD is an investment in the future. And we are confident that it is an investment that will pay off to the consumer – to the benefit of the consumer.” Musk said.
Tesla patent aims to make massive change to common automotive part
SpaceX and Google mull massive partnership on Musk’s orbital data dream: report
