One of the many changes the holiday update last month brought to Tesla owners was a brand-new music player. It doesn’t look so brand new though as the company didn’t make any visual changes to its design (mostly). Instead, it simply moved it to the bottom-left of the screen. Giving it a smaller profile on the screen and opening the maps up a little.
The only noticeable change was that you can now slide left and right to replace it with charge stats or tire pressures. A nice quick-dock solution, to describe it in simpler terms. However, the one change that isn’t so noticeable was that it was rebuilt.
Tesla decided to rebuild the music player using a web-based approach (ie, HTML, Javascript), designing it around Google Chromium, instead of the in-house build the company was using previously. It may make updates a little smoother and (hopefully) allow for easier integrations with additional services.
This leads us to the one thing we (and many others) have been patiently waiting for. The addition of more commonly used music sources like Pandora or SiriusXM (internet streaming radio). It has already added Apple Music, which was also part of the holiday update. So hopes are a bit high now for additional options.
Of course, we could never know for sure. It could be easier to make these integrations happen now, but no one knows what Tesla’s development team is actually working on until they announce something. And there has been no discussion yet about bringing these other services into the light. However, the company has shown signs of wanting to offer more and it wouldn’t make any sense to stop now. After all, it has to compete with the likes of Android Auto and some of the other solutions that have already been available with other companies.
