Tesla warns owners of a potential defect in their cars through in-car notification

Tesla is now using in-car notification to warn owners of a potential defect inside their vehicles – almost like a new way to do a recall.

All of Tesla’s vehicles are connected to the internet.

That connectivity is used for a variety of features ranging from sending back data for Autopilot to more simple entertainment features like music streaming.

One lesser-known advantage of connectivity is the ability to remote diagnostic some issues.

Whenever you have a problem with your vehicle, the first thing Tesla’s service does is attempt to perform a remote diagnostic.

Even if Tesla is not able to do a diagnostic on the issue with the connectivity, Tesla can use the connectivity to warn owners of potential problems with their cars due to a problem detected in a batch of production vehicles.

Several Tesla owners in Germany are reporting having received an in-car notification on their screen saying that they need to bring their car to service:

The problem appears to be related to the seals on a batch of Model 3 vehicles with VIN between ~910,000 to 917,000 that can result in water getting into the cabin.

When detecting a non-safety-related issue on a batch of vehicles, Tesla would instead send emails to potentially affected owners.

Now it looks like the automaker is also using in-car notifications to warn owners of potential issues.

For potential issues related to safety, Tesla still has to abide by the local laws and go through the regular channels.

Electrek‘s take

In a not-so-distant self-driving future, I can see your Tesla sending you a message asking if you need your car for a certain window of time, and if you don’t, it will drive by itself to the service center to get an issue fixed.

Of course, for safety-related issues, you have to be more careful, but for everything else, this level of connectivity plus full self-driving will make the service experience a lot better.