Some weird hacking required
Android Auto is used by a lot of car manufacturers, and if they don’t support that, chances are you can at least use Apple’s CarPlay — except for Teslas. Tesla cars use their own operating system for their dashboard, one that’s often compared against Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. It’s exclusive to Tesla cars, and while it has many advantages, sometimes you might want to use something else, but that’s currently not natively supported. Fear not, though: thanks to a new hack, Tesla cars can now enjoy Android Auto. Or, at least, they sort of can.
This new solution comes from the maker of AAWireless, Emil Borconi, and works through an Android app on your phone called TeslAA. As things stand right now, the app is in a beta stage, but it seems to work well enough for Google Maps navigation, Waze (which can only be used with an in-browser solution called Tesla Waze), and probably most things you’d like to use an Android Auto-powered head unit for. Before you jump in, we should clarify that this solution doesn’t work the way you might assume it does.
Your Tesla car itself won’t be running Android Auto, as there’s still no known way to completely swap out the operating system, and doing so would likely break a lot of the car’s basic functionality. Instead, accessing Android Auto in your Tesla is done through the car’s browser. The Android Auto interface is, quite literally, streamed from your smartphone to your Tesla dashboard.
This isn’t an entirely bad approach, and in fact, it seems to work quite well. However, with it not being a native solution, there are drawbacks: increased data consumption, slowdowns, and glitches from it being essentially just a video feed are some of them. Still, this is only a beta, so at least some of that should be polished a bit before release. We’re honestly just happy to see it exist at all, especially as Google got rid of Android Auto on phone screens.
If you have a Tesla and you’re interested in trying out this solution in your car, be sure to check out the app on the Google Play Store right now. For more info, look to the original Reddit thread.
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