You know how when you buy a new smartphone, you can transfer all of your apps, contacts, and pictures from your old phone thanks to cloud storage? Tesla is trying to make that happen with cars. Elon Musk's car company has a plan to set up their customers with personalized driver profiles for the many adjustable preferences in a vehicle, like seat and steering wheel position, map settings, and radio preferences. That means if you have a family with multiple Teslas—or if you’re borrowing someone else’s Tesla through a car-sharing arrangement, you’ll be able to hop in and have all of your own settings ready to go by entering your profile information. And you thought memory seats were fancy.
Like many Tesla announcements, this one happened via Elon Musk’s Twitter page. Someone asked Musk on Twitter if it would be possible to have profiles for different work locations in the navigation interface. Musk responded thusly:
We are going to move all info and settings to the "cloud" (aka server) so any Tesla you drive in the world automatically adjusts to you
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 20, 2017
There were several excited responses praising the idea, but of course, there were people making jokes about machines and artificial intelligence getting too smart.
So A.I. will know where to find u at all times. pic.twitter.com/GgvxmhkayZ
— President Kalola???????? (@BROWNPOTUS) August 20, 2017
This would not only be handy for multi-Tesla families, but for ride-sharing. There’s a lot of hype around the idea of ride-sharing replacing car ownership in the future, especially in urban areas; hopping in a shared vehicle and already having all of your settings where you want them would be extremely convenient.
Customizability is an important part of consumer products like smartphones. It only makes sense for Tesla to adopt it...since it's a tech company as much as it's a car company.