Tesla — the “iPhone” of the automotive industry — has several integrations with popular music services. Spotify, TuneIn, Tidal, and Slacker (as the default streamer) currently grace the UI of the Model S, Model X, Model 3, and Model Y. The elephant in the room — the omission of Apple Music — has been a thorn in the side of many a Tesla user who also subscribe to Apple’s streaming music service.
Despite people clamoring for it, Tesla vehicles will probably never adopt Apple’s CarPlay, and from a business standpoint that makes sense. Why would Tesla give up so much control of its primary interface to Apple? I don’t ever see that happening, and I personally don’t blame Tesla for this decision at all.
But having no access to Apple Music within the native Tesla UI? That decision never made sense to me. It’s probably my number one complaint about Tesla vehicles. Thankfully, it looks as if the lack of native Apple Music support may be coming to an end if a recent post on r/teslamotors rings true. (via Tesla Raj).
The image was captured at the Peterson Museum’s Tesla exhibit from a Tesla Model S running software version 2020.40.50.
Setting up the service appears to be fairly straightforward, and facilitated by a handy QR code instead of having to try to log in with an Apple ID from Tesla’s center-mounted display.
It looks like the annual holiday update is going to be one for the ages if you’re an Apple fan. Hopefully the UI is good, and perhaps there will be support for Dolby Atmos and Lossless downloads to a USB drive? I would like to imagine that Apple worked closely with Tesla to make it right, but we’ll have to wait and see.
