How To View Tesla Odometer in the Car or App

July 17, 2023

By Lennon Cihak

You can easily view your Tesla's trip meters and odometer in the vehicle

Not a Tesla App

Do you need to view how many miles are on your Tesla? Are you looking to see how far you’ve driven on a trip or figure out your vehicle's efficiency?

In this post, we’ll discuss how you can access Tesla’s odometers, both, trips odometers and the overall odometer, as well as accessing quick view trip cards on the Model 3 and Model Y.

View Odometer

The primary odometer in Teslas is located under the software tab in the vehicle’s controls. To access it, tap the car button at the bottom-left side of the screen (called “Controls”) and then touch the “Software” tab. Underneath the car's image, you'll see the vehicle model, along with the odometer and the vehicle's VIN.

Trip Odometer / Tripmeter

In addition to the main odometer, Teslas have two trip odometers for more nuanced needs. For example, using the trip odometer during a road trip will allow you to monitor the energy used, distance driven, and average watts per mile or kilometer during your trip.

To use or view the Tesla trip odometers, go to Controls > Trips. Once here, you’ll see “Trip A” and “Trip B.” These can be renamed by tapping on the trip odometer name or reset by using the buttons further down the screen. Like other vehicles, trip odometers will continue to count until they're reset.

Tips

Many vehicle owners like to keep one of the trip odometers counting since they first bought the vehicle, letting them view the energy used and average efficiency from the very beginning. Unfortunately, the vehicle's main odometer only keeps track of miles or kilometers traveled and not efficiency.

You can also use the trip meters to track how many miles you've traveled with your existing tires, or use one of them to track when your tires were last rotated. Unfortunately, you are limited to two trip meters in your Tesla, in addition to the other default meters.

Current Trip Odometer

Tesla also includes two other odometers that make it convenient to track your battery usage and time driven. The 'Current Trip' odometer is reset after each drive. If the vehicle is left in park for more than a few minutes, the current trip odometer will be reset back to 0. The 'Current Trip' odometer is the only odometer in the vehicle that tracks slightly different metrics. Like the other vehicle odometers, distance traveled and average energy usage is displayed, but instead of total energy used, the vehicle will display the amount of time you've been driving in minutes. Similar to Trip A and Trip B, the current trip odometer can also be reset whenever you'd like by tapping the 'Reset Current Trip' button at the bottom of the screen.

Since Last Charge Odometer

The vehicle also tracks the distance traveled and energy used since the vehicle was last charged. This metric could be useful toward the end of a charge cycle to know how many miles or kilometers your vehicle achieves on your typical charge or to get an idea of the average energy used by the vehicle during the season. The only way to reset your 'Since Last Charge' odometer is by charging your vehicle.

Using Tesla's Mobile App

If you have access to the vehicle on Tesla's mobile app, the easiest way to view your primary odometer is to open the app and scroll to the bottom. Your odometer will be displayed at the very bottom of the app, directly underneath the vehicle model. Along with the odometer, you’ll also be able to view the vehicle’s configuration, VIN, software version and more. Unfortunately, the odometer is the only one that is displayed in the app, and the other trip meters aren't available.

View Odometer While Driving

If you’re in a Model 3 or Model Y, Tesla recently brought back trip cards. These small informational cards give you a quick view of your trip meters or vehicle tire pressure.

To access Tesla’s trip cards, simply swipe left on the mini music player controls. You'll be able to choose between the music player, trip cards and tire pressure cards. If you don't see the music player on the left, you'll need to tap on the gray music icon in your vehicle's bottom menu.

Picking the Odometers

Your vehicle can display up to four trip meters of your choice on the Trips card. To choose which to display navigate to Controls > Trips and tap 'Show in Trips Card' for each trip meter you'd like to display. These trip cards are not available in the Model S and Model X.

Is Tesla Planning to Add Steam Support to All Vehicles?

December 11, 2024

By Karan Singh

Not a Tesla App

Yesterday, we reported that Tesla updated their Steam integration on Model S and Model X vehicles. The update was part of their 2024 Holiday Update, but it looks like there may be more to this than a simple update.

Steam, a video game library app, makes it easy for users to buy or launch games on their computers. However, a couple of years ago, Valve, who created Steam, launched their own standalone device, the Steam Deck. The Steam Deck runs a custom OS based on Linux.

Steam Launch

When Tesla launched the redesigned Model S and Model X, Tesla introduced a dedicated gaming GPU with 16GB of RAM and touted the ability to play top-tier PC games in Tesla vehicles.

In 2022, Tesla finally launched the Steam app for the Model S and Model X as part of its 2022 Holiday Update. The Steam app runs Steam OS, the same OS as the Steam Deck in a virtual environment.

However, earlier this year, Tesla stopped including the GPU and Steam (Beta) in their vehicles, and we haven’t seen any updates to the Steam in quite some time. In fact, we thought Tesla was axing their gaming-on-the-go dreams.

SteamOS Update

The Steam app, which is still in Beta, is getting an interesting update for the Model S and Model X vehicles with the discrete GPU.

Those vehicles received an update to SteamOS 3.6 - the same version of SteamOS that runs on the Steam Deck. While nothing has visually changed, there’s a long list of performance optimizations under the hood to get things running smoother.

Comparing Steam Deck to Tesla Vehicles

Let’s take a look at the Steam Deck - according to Valve, its onboard Zen4 CPU and GPU combined push a total of 2 TFlops of data, which is fairly respectable, but much lower than today’s home consoles. The Steam Deck is capable of 720p gaming fairly seamlessly on low-to-medium settings on the go and is also built on the AMD platform.

AMD-equipped Teslas, including the Model 3 and Model Y, are packing an older Zen+ (Zen 1.5) APU (processor with a combined CPU and GPU). AMD claims that the V1000 - the same embedded chip as on AMD Tesla vehicles (YE1807C3T4MFB), brings up to 3.6 TFLops of processing power with it, including 4K encoding and decoding with the integrated GPU on board.

While that’s not enough for 4K gaming or comparable to a full-blown console or desktop GPU, that’s enough raw horsepower for light gaming and is currently more powerful than the Steam Deck.

The Model S and Model X’s GPU brings that up to about 10TFlops of power - comparable to modern consoles like the Xbox Series X at 12 TFlops.

Steam Gaming for All Vehicles?

The fact that Tesla is updating SteamOS even though the feature is no longer available in any new vehicles could indicate that Tesla is not only bringing Steam back to Teslas but that it’s going to play a much bigger role.

While SteamOS is run in a virtual environment on top of Tesla’s own OS, we could see Tesla bring SteamOS to all of its current vehicles, including the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck. Steam in these vehicles would likely support any game that’s capable of running on the Steam Deck.

We think this Steam update, which includes performance improvements and a variety of fixes, has quietly passed under most people’s radars. This could be a very exciting update for those who enjoy gaming, especially for those who love to do it in their Tesla.

Tesla Holiday Update Weather Features: All the Small Details

December 11, 2024

By Karan Singh

Robert Rosenfeld / YouTube

As part of Tesla’s 2024 Holiday Update, Tesla included two awesome new features - Weather at Destination and the long-awaited Weather Radar Overlay. These two features are big upgrades built upon the weather feature that was added in update 2024.26. The original weather feature added an hourly forecast, as well as the chance of precipitation, UV index, Air Quality Index, and other data.

However, this update also added some smaller weather touches, such as the vehicle alerting you if the weather at the destination will be drastically different from the current weather.

Not a Tesla App

Weather At Destination

When you’re navigating to a destination and viewing the full navigation direction list, the text under the arrival time will show you the expected weather next to your destination. You can also tap this, and the full weather pop-up will show up, showing your destination's full set of weather information.

Note the weather under the arrival time

Not a Tesla App

You can also tap the weather icon at the top of the interface at any time and tap Destination to switch between the weather at your current location and the weather at your destination.

You’re probably considering that the weather at your destination doesn’t matter when you’re three hours away - but that’s all taken into account by the trip planner. It will add in both charge time and travel time and show you the weather at your destination at your expected arrival time.

And if the weather is drastically different or inclement, such as rain or snow, while you’ve got sunshine and rainbows - the weather will be shown above the destination ETA for a few moments before it tucks itself away.

Tesla also recently introduced a new voice command. Asking, “What’s the weather?” or something similar will now bring up Tesla’s weather popup.

The weather pop-up above the ETA

Not a Tesla App

One limitation, though—if you’re planning a long road trip that is more than a day of driving, the weather at destination feature won’t be available until you get closer.

Weather Radar Overlay

As part of the improvements to weather, Tesla has also added a radar overlay for precipitation. You can access the new radar overlay by tapping the map and then tapping the weather icon on the right side of the map. It’ll bring up a radar overlay centered on your vehicle. It’ll animate through the radar data over the last 3 hours so that you can see the direction of the storm, but you can also pause it at any point.

You’re able to scroll around in this view and see the weather anywhere, even if you zoom out. It also works while you’re driving, although it can be a little confusing if you’re trying to pay attention to the navigation system. If you like to have Points of Interest enabled on your map, the weather overlay will hide POIs except for Charging POIs.

Requirements / Data

Unfortunately, you’ll need Premium Connectivity for any of the weather features to work, and being on WiFi or using a hotspot will not be enough to get the data to show up. The data, including the weather radar, is provided by The Weather Channel.

As for supported models, weather and weather at destination are available on all vehicles except for the 2012-2020 Model S and Model X. The weather radar has more strict requirements and requires the newer AMD Ryzen-powered infotainment center available on the 2021+ Model S and Model X and more recent Model 3 and Model Y vehicles.