Meet NESsy! Plus some thoughts coming from Tesla
Hi Y'all! Meet NESsy, named so because the cyber gray color scheme reminds me of my old NES.
I'm one of the recent converts from Tesla. My lease on my Model Y was due to be up in March so I went ahead and picked up a 2025 Ioniq 5 SEL. So far I'm really enjoying it but after around 100 miles on it I wanted to record some thoughts on where I think the software side falls short in case I'm missing something or if maybe some of these things are going to get fixed in the future
- No walk-away locking. I've seen tons of people complain about this, but coming from the Tesla this is super annoying, especially considering that it will auto-lock if it auto-unlocked but you didn't get in the car
- No play/pause button on the steering wheel and no option to map the star button to be a play/pause button. I've seen people mention that with CarPlay the mute button should function as a play/pause button but I haven't seen that working in practice. It's a super annoying omission if you like podcasts or audio books while driving
- The built in navigation is just awful. It's slower, it misses my usual alternate route options that Tesla, Apple Maps, and Google Maps all give me, and the charge routing has been really inconsistent. For more on that watch the Ioniq Guy's road trip video, particularly where the navigation tells him to go charge for 1 to 3 minutes at a charger to "top up" for the next destination.
- Music via CarPlay is slower to start when I get in the car compared to the built-in apps on Tesla and sometimes doesn't seem to auto-resume what I was just playing on my phone a few minutes before
- Remote lock via the app took around 2 minutes while the car was in my garage. That's... bafflingly bad compared to the Tesla, and more than enough time for someone to steal something from my car in that situation.
- I hate the key fob and just having the key fob with me in general, but without the walkaway locks I feel I need to have it so I don't have to run back to my car to manually lock it if I forget to when I get out.
- Can't default to i-drive (1 pedal driving). The fact that it remembers any setting other than i-drive makes this seem intentional but it's such a dumb decision.
- Can't default the home screen to anything other than that list of apps thing. Why not the built-in navigation screen, or the split navigation / music screen just to the left of the list of apps, or auto switch to CarPlay? It defaults to the only option that's truly useless when the car boots up.
- Voice commands are behind Tesla. I know this was only added in December but I already use the "Turn on Avoid Tolls" command mid drive all the time because of where I live in Texas. Some of the tolls are reasonable, some of them change throughout the day to outrageous prices ($20+ for a segment of the toll road) so it's annoying not having an easy way to do this mid-route.
- No audio cues when you start and stop HDA. This might seem minor, but I don't want to look down at the instrument panel screen to double check this.
- No way to set speed thresholds on HDA based on the current speed limit. It's an awesome feature on the Tesla, telling it "set HDA speed to 10% higher than the speed limit" so that I don't have to mess with the speed after enabling HDA.
- No automatic turning on for heated seats or steering wheel. I believe Tesla does this based on the outside temperature vs the desired cabin temperature and it's a really nice feature.
- I might just have missed this, but I don't see how to immediately go into a default profile? It puts my profile up on screen for 10 seconds before selecting it, but I'm the only person driving my car so it doesn't make sense to even show this screen.
A lot of these things are small on their own, but they add up to a lot of extra crap you have to do for the regular driving experience. When I get in my Ioniq 5 I need to turn on i-pedal, turn on heated seats / steering wheel, select my profile if the 10 second timeout hasn't happened, change the display, make sure my music is playing from CarPlay (might be an issue with YouTube Music not auto-resuming), and determine if I need to charge on the way so I can either navigate with CarPlay (no charging, better navigation) or the built-in navigation (only when I need to charge on the way). When I got in my Tesla I would just say "Navigate to [destination]" and everything else I mentioned is automatically done for me either based on preferences or determined by the software.
Hopefully some of these things will get improved in OTA updates, but it has a long long way to go until the user experience of the car matches the current state of Tesla. It's also unclear how much of these are intentional decisions (like the missing walk-away lock) vs just oversights that they could hopefully easily update (allow me to set the star button to play/pause). Hopefully product managers at Hyundai check reddit from time to time to see where users pain points are. In any case, just glad to move away from Tesla for no