The Model S software still has some ways to improve

Oct 23, 2013 09:32 GMT  ·  By

Elon Musk is a busy man, running two very successful and demanding companies, namely Tesla and SpaceX. He divides his time between SpaceX launches – the latest was the first of the revised Falcon 9 v1.1 rocket, and getting ready to expand the Tesla lineup with an SUV and, later, a more affordable model.

At an event in Munich, Musk was asked about the software platform in the Tesla car and he revealed quite a few interesting things.

An open API for the platform is still more than a year away, he says. For now, the software team is hard at work on localization software, to make the car better suited for various markets around the world.

Another big update the carmaker has planned is upgrading to Google Chrome as the default browser.

The Model S has a 17-inch touch screen to serve as both the navigation display and most of the controls of the car, the climate control, and things like that. Browsing the web on that should be fairly satisfying, though not while driving, hopefully.

Beyond that, opening up the platform will be a priority. Tesla Model S uses a modified Linux with the QT library for graphics to run its internal computers, so developing for it should be fairly straightforward.

However, Tesla may opt for a different route, rather than have developers create native apps. It may build an Android "emulator," as Musk calls it, into the software.

Specifically, what this means it that Tesla could probably include the Dalvik Java virtual machine and various Android APIs and libraries, to run Android apps. This approach couldn't get Google's blessing, i.e. it would not be an approved Android "device" and wouldn't get the Play store.

But Tesla could work with Google on a customized Android build that could run on dedicated resources or somehow alongside the Model S software. Google has been looking to push Android beyond phones and tablets, so a partnership with Tesla could prove a very interesting way of expanding the mobile OS to cars.