“Drive on sunshine” ☀️ Also known as “charge on solar”. Or, just fr

ee car fuel from the sun, with no ongoing cost, fumes, noise, trips to a fuel station, burning coal, paying for oil to questionable regimes… well, you get the picture 😉.

Tesla updated the software today to finally enable this feature in Australia. We first saw reports about it coming last week, but it didn’t appear. The USA has had it for a while, perhaps a year. I don’t know why they need to release it on a per country basis.

Being the tech nerd that I am, after reading an email from Tesla today, I checked several times that my Tesla app was up to date, manually triggered the software update on the car, tried logging out and back into the Tesla app several times. Finally, a few minutes ago, the new feature appeared!

If I had just left it, the overnight update cycle would probably have just done it all for me.

Ironically, it’s after sunset now, so I can’t actually use it. But I have configured it so that the morning sunshine will start charging the car.

Previously, I have used the Charge HQ app to ensure that our car charges from just solar. It has a lot of features, but the user interface is a bit ugly. I’m hoping the Tesla app will give some better integration and more options going forward. But it’s pretty simple and does the job.