- Tesla's Phone Key app experienced a brief outage on Labor Day, locking some Tesla Model 3 owners out of their vehicles when they couldn't use it to open the doors.
- Tesla points out that the owner's manual recommends that owners carry a physical key fob or key card just in case.
- Not a big deal—unless you were the one trapped at the Supercharger for hours—but it does point out that it's good not to be completely dependent on a mobile app.
Smartphone apps go down all the time, but rarely do they affect your ability to drive your car. On Labor Day, though, some Tesla owners were unable to get into their vehicles thanks to an outage with the official Tesla app.
The app has a feature called Phone Key that turns a smartphone into, well, a key. It can be used to lock and unlock a Model 3 without ever taking the phone out of a pocket. Tesla even recommends Phone Key be used as the "primary method of accessing and starting your vehicle," according to the company's website.
But relying solely on Phone Key can be a bad idea, it turns out. Starting at around 4 p.m. Pacific time on Monday, Tesla's mobile app became unavailable for what Tesla says was a brief time. The company says that full functionality was restored soon after the outage was reported, but that was enough time for the internet to notice. Some drivers, among them Kyle Field, a Tesla owner and an editor at CleanTechnica, experienced it as a minor issue.
"I opened the app to use summon to back my car into a spot with better visibility and the app did not come up," he told Car and Driver. "I reloaded it, and it came up with the login screen. Having seen a few tweets about an outage, I assumed that was the problem and added my name to the list. A few tweets later, I realized that all that was needed was to log in again."
After seeing numerous reports of a @Tesla app outage, I confirmed that I'm also locked out. Southern California FWIW.
— Kyle Field (@mrkylefield) September 3, 2019
Others were not so lucky, with some Tesla owners saying on Twitter that they were locked out of their cars for up to four hours. Some were stuck at Supercharger stations, plugged in longer than necessary. Tesla says that none of these drivers would have had a problem if they had followed the owner's manual, which makes it clear they should always carry a physical key fob or key card (pictured below).
The reason the automaker recommends this is for when the phone's battery dies. In yesterday's outage, thought, the phones were working just fine. Tesla says that if an owner didn't log out of the app, then it still should have functioned correctly, since the Phone Key technology uses Bluetooth Low Energy frequencies instead of a network connection to communicate with the paired Model 3. This Bluetooth connectivity does not apply to Model S or Model X vehicles, which can use the Tesla app's lock and unlock features as long as they have a cellular signal. We surmise, therefore, that Phone Key is not a reliable technology for these particular Tesla vehicles in places where the driver can't get a cell signal, like in a parking garage.
This is not the first time that the Tesla app hasn't acted the way the company says it should. When some media control units were replaced in 2018, digital certificates were not transferred properly, which also kept some people out of their cars when they tried to use the app to unlock the doors. Tesla says this issue has been resolved.
By: Car and Driver
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