By Karan Singh
For a company that builds arguably the most advanced batteries on wheels and the infrastructure to charge them with, Tesla seems surprisingly bad at charging the tiny battery you carry in your pocket daily.
If you own a modern Tesla, you know the drill: you get in, you place your phone on the felted Alcantara pad, and drive. Thirty minutes later, you pick up a device that is molten hot, has stopped charging due to a “Temperature Warning”, and has gained maybe 4% additional battery life.
For years, the wireless phone charging pad has felt like less of a charger and more of a phone warmer. It’s inefficient, slow, and potentially damaging to your phone’s long-term battery health, which is why charging gets slowed or stops entirely. But the frustrating part isn’t just that it’s bad – it’s that Tesla already has the tech to fix it, but they just haven’t given it to us yet.
The Hot Potato
The issue stems from the older Qi standard Tesla uses. Without magnets (like Apple’s MagSafe or the open Qi2 standard), to perfectly align the phone’s copper coil with the car’s charging coil, energy transfer is inefficient. However, it doesn’t just disappear; it turns into waste heat.
Combine that misalignment with a lack of airflow and the sun beating down on your phone through the glass roof, and you have a recipe for thermal throttling. The charger continues to pump 5-15 watts of energy into a device that can’t accept it, effectively turning into a space heater rather than a charger.
The Solution Exists (In China)
We know Tesla is capable of solving this problem, and not just because the whole world knows how — they do too. In the recently launched Model Y L, exclusive to the Chinese market for now, Tesla implemented a completely redesigned charging module.
This new unit features active fan cooling with dedicated vents that blast air against the back and sides of the phone. The result? Your device stays cool enough to sustain charging speeds of up to 50W — ten times the effective speed of current charging pads. If Tesla can engineer this for the Model Y L in Shanghai, there is no excuse for the rest of the lineup to still be lacking the feature.
Software Wishlist
Until the hardware catches up, Tesla needs to give us some better software controls to manage the heat, as the issue will continue to plague older vehicles. Here are some features we’re wishing would arrive in the Holiday Update:
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An Off switch. No, really – it sounds simple, and almost dumb, but you cannot turn off your phone toaster if you put your phone on the super conveniently-placed charging pad. A simple toggle in the UI would go a long way to prevent playing hot potato with your phone on the way out. This way, you could at least have a nice place to set your phone down without overheating it. Musk said this was coming back in 2022, so Tesla is either still planning to release it, or it fell off their roadmap.
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Thermal Throttling. Your car knows the cabin temperature. If the cabin is 80°F, it shouldn’t be running the charging pad at full tilt; it should slow down and reduce the wattage or disable the pad automatically if it reaches unsafe temperatures.
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State-of-Charge limits. Just like we limit our cars to 80% charge for battery health, let us do the same for our phones. Some phones allow this through the OS, which helps preserve the battery. However, Tesla also has access to the phone’s battery state of charge when connected via Bluetooth. They can allow users to select a maximum charging limit for their phone, just like they do for their vehicles.
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We’d love for Tesla to display your phone’s battery level on the vehicle’s display. Since Tesla knows your phone’s battery level, it should display it or even alert you with a notification when your phone reaches a low state of charge.
Hardware Wishlist
Looking forward, just bringing the active cooling and 50W pads from China isn’t enough. As phone batteries get ever denser and faster charging, Tesla needs to keep up. That means adopting Qi2 (the open version of MagSafe that works with all devices) and ultra-fast wireless charging.
Magnetic alignment solves the root cause of the heat by ensuring perfect coil placement every time. It also holds your phone in place, whether you’re on the road, on the track, or off-roading. Third-party companies offer Qi2 pads that work in all of these conditions, and just need a simple USB cable – all while charging far faster than the existing pads.
Adding magnets will not only charge your phone faster, reduce heat, and prevent your phone from wobbling, it’ll also better support charging smaller devices such as AirPods.
Tesla has some absolutely world-class engineering – and they’re even working on wirelessly charging vehicles too – so why can’t we get functional phone charging?
By Karan Singh
Tesla is always a fan of removing excess parts, and often, that also means simplifying information. In this case, they’ve applied the less-is-more principle on the Suspension menu in the 2026 Model S and Model X.
For years, enthusiasts have loved the detailed, data-rich look into the inner workings of the vehicle’s adaptive suspension, complete with real-time monitoring, feedback, and granular controls.
Now, with software changes on the refreshed Model S and X, Tesla has completely overhauled this interface, trading data-rich menus for simplicity with the new Dynamics tab, taking a page from the Cybertruck.
This change follows Tesla’s shift in their user interface philosophy: ease of use and intelligent presets are better than manual, deep-level adjustments.
The Old Suspension Tab
2025 and older Model S and Model X vehicles have a Suspension tab that presented drivers with detailed information about their suspension and offered granular options.
The centerpiece was a live diagram of the vehicle, visualizing how the air suspension was behaving at all four corners.
Tech-savvy owners loved this interface for its transparency and control. It offered real-time data on wheel readouts, including compression and rebound data, body acceleration, and ride height measured down to the millimeter.
It also offered more precise sliders for ride comfort and handling, enabling fine-tuning of the car’s ride style from soft to firm, and comfort to sport. Alongside that, a multi-step slider provided distinct levels for ride height, including Low, Standard, High, and Very High.
This older interface empowered drivers to tinker and tailor the suspension feel to their exact preference, and rewarded those who took the time to understand its intricacies. While power users likely enjoyed the granular controls, most owners likely found it overwhelming.
Riding into the Dynamics Tab
In 2026 vehicles, the dedicated Suspension tab is gone. In its place is a simplified Dynamics tab, which groups all settings related to the car’s driving feel into a single, streamlined location. The new interface does away with the data-heavy display in favor of clean and simple options. It consolidates acceleration modes, steering weight, and ride-and-handling presets.
The primary ride height control has been moved to the Controls tab, while users can toggle between Lower and Higher preferred heights on the Dynamics tab, allowing the vehicle to manage the specific heights.
The Drive Mode presets, including Comfort, Standard, and Insane/Plaid, change the settings underneath as a bundle, enabling easy and simple choices for users, while Custom offers some of the old functionality, without the additional level of detail.
A Focus on Simplicity
Tesla’s decision to simplify these menus stems from a clear philosophy of reducing user input and trusting the vehicle’s automated systems to do the brunt of the decision-making. The streamlined Dynamics menu is far less intimidating to new users and significantly faster to use. You can change the personality and style of the car with a single tap, rather than needing to adjust multiple sliders.
As Tesla’s adaptive suspension has matured, the system has become far better at interpreting road conditions and driver inputs. The three presets are now so well tuned that Tesla likely feels they cover the vast majority of driving scenarios, making fine-tuning redundant for most users.
While some long-time enthusiasts will mourn the loss of the vehicle display, the data, and the granular controls, this evolution is a sign of Tesla’s focus on the mainstream user. Many of those functions are still available in Track Mode V3.
Does Not Apply to Older Models
A lot of owners are understandably unhappy when Tesla removes features they once had. While Tesla could have provided these software changes to all vehicles, it is only applying them to new, 2026 models, making sure that existing vehicles are unaffected by the simplified menus.
This is an approach Tesla has taken for several years. If Tesla wants to simplify options or make major changes, they’ll only apply them to newer vehicles. An example is removing the option for Low regen, which reduces vehicle efficiency. While newer vehicles don’t offer the option, older vehicles can still choose between Low and Standard regenerative braking.
In Tesla’s view, the ultimate luxury isn’t infinite control or fine-tuning knobs or dials – it’s not having to think about any of it at all.
By Karan Singh
One of the most powerful yet least understood tools in Tesla’s autonomous driving development is Shadow Mode. Running code in shadow mode is a common software engineering method that lets a company test out new code in production without affecting the user.
For Tesla, it’s a core part of the data engine that allows FSD to learn and improve at an incredible scale. In short, FSD runs silently in the background on your Tesla, even when FSD isn’t enabled. The system will constantly make driving decisions without actually controlling the car.
This clever approach allows Tesla to gather an immense amount of real-world data, and it’s a key piece of the puzzle in the quest to solve autonomous driving. Let’s take a look at exactly what Shadow Mode is, how it works, and why it is so important.
What is Shadow Mode
The process behind Shadow Mode is both simple and brilliant. While a human is driving, FSD is also running silently in the background, as if it were in control. It receives the exact same inputs from the car’s cameras and sensors that it would if it were actively engaged, and based on this data, it makes hypothetical driving decisions.
In fact, when you see on your screen FSD’s grey tentacle, that’s exactly what it is.
The crucial step and differentiator between active FSD and Shadow Mode is what happens next. These hypothetical decisions made by the AI aren’t executed, because after all, the human is driving. Instead, the system compares its decision with the driver’s decision and evaluates them. Wrong or different decisions can then be sent back to Tesla for analysis.
Essentially, for every second of a drive, Tesla is collecting data on the countless moments where FSD’s decision matches the driver’s, helping to validate the system’s behavior. But more importantly, it’s also capturing every single instance where they differ.
Data Feedback Loop
This constant comparison allows Tesla to always analyze what the vehicle would do, compared to what the driver actually does.
Much like a textbook’s answer key, the driver’s decision is considered the correct answer, and FSD tries to come up with the same decision. For those who have had FSD for a number of years, you may remember when FSD first started responding to traffic lights — stopping on red and going on green. In this simplistic shadow-mode scenario, FSD would determine whether it considers the light red or green. It would then compare this to the driver’s behavior. If the vehicle thought the light was red and the vehicle went through it, then imagery and video could be sent back to Tesla to help train the system — essentially saying this is what a green light looks like.
Another example of shadow mode use is when Tesla transitioned from ultrasonic sensors to vision for parking assist. Tesla could running vision in shadow mode and compare the distance it thought it was from the object to the output from the ultrasonic sensors (the truth). This was discovered when an owner removed ultrasonic sensors from their vehicle and realized the vehicle continued to detect distances.
These disagreements are edge cases, a real-world lesson that teaches FSD about a scenario it may not have handled perfectly. For owners who have agreed to Tesla’s data privacy policies, these specific moments are packaged as training data to be sent back to Tesla, to help make FSD even better.
Competitive Advantage
Shadow Mode is more than just a clever feature; it’s the key to Tesla’s competitive advantage in the race to develop autonomy. While many competitors rely on smaller, dedicated test fleets that number in the hundreds or thousands, Tesla’s Shadow Mode effectively turns its entire global fleet of millions of vehicles into a massive, passive data-gathering and validation network.
It allows Tesla to test new software builds against an unparalleled volume and diversity of real-world driving scenarios: inclement weather, challenging road layouts, edge-case traffic interactions. All done without any risk to the driver.
That’s a self-improving feedback loop, built into every single Tesla on the road that is nearly impossible for competitors to replicate, allowing Tesla to iterate and improve at unmatched scale.