Photo: @TeslaAndroid via Twitter | Edited
Tesla doesn’t offer Android Auto and Apple CarPlay support in its cars, but coding enthusiasts have created workarounds. Tesla’s Android project runs in the car’s browser and offers many interesting features. Recently, the developer has added multi-touch support, opening a new world of possibilities, including playing games from the Android Play Store.
Thanks to their simple and powerful nature, Android Auto and Apple CarPlay have become the de facto user interface in modern vehicles. No matter how bad a car’s infotainment system or navigation is, you can always count on Android Auto or Apple CarPlay to offer a familiar interface and access to all your apps and features. Unfortunately, not all car models provide this kind of mobile phone integration, and Teslas are among them. Thanks to the good people behind the Tesla Android project, this problem has been solved, and you can run Android Auto or Apple CarPlay in a Tesla. Sort of.
Tesla Android started as a home-brew project, so it was more of a geek delight than a consumer-friendly solution in its early phases. It required two Raspberry Pi boards and a lot of fiddling to make things work, barely. Fortunately, Michal Gapinski, the developer behind the project, has advanced far enough recently that you can now have it working on almost any Tesla vehicle with an MCU2 or newer.
The installation has become more straightforward, but one Raspberry Pi 4 board is still required. The Raspberry Pi would broadcast its own Wi-Fi signal to which you need to connect your Tesla for everything to work. To run Apple CarPlay, you’d also need a CarlinKit dongle and an LTE router for the Raspberry Pi. The board can still be used offline, but in this case, your Tesla would not have an internet connection anymore as it expects the Raspberry Pi Wi-Fi network to replace the connectivity provided by Tesla.
The project has achieved a major milestone recently with the switch to Android 13 and the addition of a new audio engine and hardware display encoder. It also supports USB tethering for Android devices, getting closer to being feature-complete. The changes allow Tesla Android to display DRM content and reproduce lossless audio, among other things. On April 3, Gapinski announced that Tesla Android had also gained multi-touch support, a big improvement over previous versions.
The 10-point multi-touch support allows interaction with apps in an almost native manner for pinch-zoom and other functions. Users can zoom in and out and pan the map in the navigation app for the first time. Another good use for the multi-touch function is playing multi-touch games from the Android Play Store. The Tesla Android project still cannot use the car’s GPS directly and relies on additional hardware. The developer wants future iterations to better integrate with the vehicle to enable location access to all apps in the Play Store.
Tesla Android started as a home-brew project, so it was more of a geek delight than a consumer-friendly solution in its early phases. It required two Raspberry Pi boards and a lot of fiddling to make things work, barely. Fortunately, Michal Gapinski, the developer behind the project, has advanced far enough recently that you can now have it working on almost any Tesla vehicle with an MCU2 or newer.
The installation has become more straightforward, but one Raspberry Pi 4 board is still required. The Raspberry Pi would broadcast its own Wi-Fi signal to which you need to connect your Tesla for everything to work. To run Apple CarPlay, you’d also need a CarlinKit dongle and an LTE router for the Raspberry Pi. The board can still be used offline, but in this case, your Tesla would not have an internet connection anymore as it expects the Raspberry Pi Wi-Fi network to replace the connectivity provided by Tesla.
The project has achieved a major milestone recently with the switch to Android 13 and the addition of a new audio engine and hardware display encoder. It also supports USB tethering for Android devices, getting closer to being feature-complete. The changes allow Tesla Android to display DRM content and reproduce lossless audio, among other things. On April 3, Gapinski announced that Tesla Android had also gained multi-touch support, a big improvement over previous versions.
The 10-point multi-touch support allows interaction with apps in an almost native manner for pinch-zoom and other functions. Users can zoom in and out and pan the map in the navigation app for the first time. Another good use for the multi-touch function is playing multi-touch games from the Android Play Store. The Tesla Android project still cannot use the car’s GPS directly and relies on additional hardware. The developer wants future iterations to better integrate with the vehicle to enable location access to all apps in the Play Store.
Fruit Ninja and tons of other Android games are on the way to your Tesla ???????????? https://t.co/mHrwa9g5eO pic.twitter.com/OsKwihoO6Y
— Tesla Android Project (@TeslaAndroid) April 3, 2023
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