In my last couple posts I covered Tesla Firmware 6.1 additions around trip energy prediction, range, routes and parking. Here we’ll cover some new additions for all Model S owners around media and other areas.

Shuffle and repeat

When I wrote about the USB music player in the Model S a while back I lamented missing shuffle functionality. I haven’t used the USB music player since I took delivery 9 months ago due to that one missing feature.

I’m happy to report that shuffle is now supported on the USB music player and it works as expected. You can go to any playlist, start playing a song, make sure shuffle is selected and the next song will be randomly chosen for you from the playlist.

The repeat function repeats all songs in your playlist (sequentially or randomly depending on the shuffle option). If you only have one song in your playlist you’re going to hear it a lot.

Not only was shuffle a very requested feature, its a smart move for Tesla as i’ll now be listening to my USB music a lot more and Slacker a lot less which takes data off the 3G connection.

Internet media improvements

Slacker (and Rdio for international owners) now show progress while buffering the music which may not change anything you do but it was an obvious omission for a streaming music service and is a nice improvement.

Podcasts on TuneIn got improvements in being able to use the media scrubber (the little control you can drag to move back and forth to rewind and fast forward in the media player) and the ability to remember your podcast position when you leave and return to your Model S. Its these little additions that make the applications actually useful in the real world versus a showroom.

Calendar improvements

In 6.1 Tesla made a few nice additions to the calendar app. Event notes are now accessible and you can access them by clicking the little “i” icon next to the calendar event.

Another great addition is that you can now click on URL’s embedded in those notes and they’ll open in the Model S web browser. This is a great way to send URLs from your computer or phone to the Model S. Gone are the days of having to type in long URLs of cool sites your found that you want to try on your Model S. Just add them to a calendar event and click away.

Phone numbers in appointments are called out in the calendar view and you can also click to dial them.

This interaction between the apps is interesting to see as it opens the way for more interesting things like clicking on a song name and getting lyrics in the web browser, etc.

Key FOB Update

With the 6.1 firmware update Tesla actually added functionality to your key FOB. You can now press and hold the rear hatch to open the charge port. This is very useful for times when the Supercharger button doesn’t open your charge port or when using a J1772 or other adapter.

Summary

With this series of posts i’ve highlighted the areas that were most interesting and exciting to me. The autopilot improvements would also be of great interest, but alas, i’m missing that hardware.

There are several other improvements I haven’t covered like simplified right steering wheel controls, a factory reset option and a new smart conditioning option in beta status. If smart conditioning manages to learn my driving pattern and does something useful i’ll do a post on that too.

Overall 6.1 was a great update with many requested and unrequested enhancements and continues to make the Tesla Model S the best car on the planet.