For a company that builds arguably the most advanced batteries on wheels and the infrastructure to charge them with, Tesla seems surprisingly bad at charging the tiny battery you carry in your pocket daily.
If you own a modern Tesla, you know the drill: you get in, you place your phone on the felted Alcantara pad, and drive. Thirty minutes later, you pick up a device that is molten hot, has stopped charging due to a “Temperature Warning”, and has gained maybe 4% additional battery life.
For years, the wireless phone charging pad has felt like less of a charger and more of a phone warmer. It’s inefficient, slow, and potentially damaging to your phone’s long-term battery health, which is why charging gets slowed or stops entirely. But the frustrating part isn’t just that it’s bad - it’s that Tesla already has the tech to fix it, but they just haven’t given it to us yet.
The Hot Potato
The issue stems from the older Qi standard Tesla uses. Without magnets (like Apple’s MagSafe or the open Qi2 standard), to perfectly align the phone’s copper coil with the car’s charging coil, energy transfer is inefficient. However, it doesn’t just disappear; it turns into waste heat.
Combine that misalignment with a lack of airflow and the sun beating down on your phone through the glass roof, and you have a recipe for thermal throttling. The charger continues to pump 5-15 watts of energy into a device that can’t accept it, effectively turning into a space heater rather than a charger.
The Solution Exists (In China)
We know Tesla is capable of solving this problem, and not just because the whole world knows how — they do too. In the recently launched Model Y L, exclusive to the Chinese market for now, Tesla implemented a completely redesigned charging module.
This new unit features active fan cooling with dedicated vents that blast air against the back and sides of the phone. The result? Your device stays cool enough to sustain charging speeds of up to 50W — ten times the effective speed of current charging pads. If Tesla can engineer this for the Model Y L in Shanghai, there is no excuse for the rest of the lineup to still be lacking the feature.
Software Wishlist
Until the hardware catches up, Tesla needs to give us some better software controls to manage the heat, as the issue will continue to plague older vehicles. Here are some features we’re wishing would arrive in the Holiday Update:
An Off switch. No, really - it sounds simple, and almost dumb, but you cannot turn off your phone toaster if you put your phone on the super conveniently-placed charging pad. A simple toggle in the UI would go a long way to prevent playing hot potato with your phone on the way out. This way, you could at least have a nice place to set your phone down without overheating it. Musk said this was coming back in 2022, so Tesla is either still planning to release it, or it fell off their roadmap.
Thermal Throttling. Your car knows the cabin temperature. If the cabin is 80°F, it shouldn’t be running the charging pad at full tilt; it should slow down and reduce the wattage or disable the pad automatically if it reaches unsafe temperatures.
State-of-Charge limits. Just like we limit our cars to 80% charge for battery health, let us do the same for our phones. Some phones allow this through the OS, which helps preserve the battery. However, Tesla also has access to the phone’s battery state of charge when connected via Bluetooth. They can allow users to select a maximum charging limit for their phone, just like they do for their vehicles.
We’d love for Tesla to display your phone’s battery level on the vehicle’s display. Since Tesla knows your phone’s battery level, it should display it or even alert you with a notification when your phone reaches a low state of charge.
Hardware Wishlist
Looking forward, just bringing the active cooling and 50W pads from China isn’t enough. As phone batteries get ever denser and faster charging, Tesla needs to keep up. That means adopting Qi2 (the open version of MagSafe that works with all devices) and ultra-fast wireless charging.
Magnetic alignment solves the root cause of the heat by ensuring perfect coil placement every time. It also holds your phone in place, whether you’re on the road, on the track, or off-roading. Third-party companies offer Qi2 pads that work in all of these conditions, and just need a simple USB cable - all while charging far faster than the existing pads.
Adding magnets will not only charge your phone faster, reduce heat, and prevent your phone from wobbling, it’ll also better support charging smaller devices such as AirPods.
Tesla has some absolutely world-class engineering - and they’re even working on wirelessly charging vehicles too - so why can’t we get functional phone charging?
