- If you're wondering where the HUD is for your Model 3,
I may have a solution for you.
Stay tuned.
(upbeat music)
Hey, thanks for joining me, I'm Ben Sullins
and welcome to Teslanomics,
the show where we decode the economics behind Tesla,
and today, I'm veering off course a little bit
to show you something that I'm pretty excited about,
and I think you will be, too.
And this is the Navdy HUD, that's a Head-Up Display
for your Model 3, or any other car for that matter.
And I recently got a chance to take a look at this,
and really try to understand,
is this something that Model 3 owners are going to want?
And is it going to be useful?
So to recap, the Model 3 will not have a normal dashboard
sitting behind the steering wheel.
Instead, you're gonna have everything on the center console,
including speed, navigation, everything else.
So you will have to constantly be looking back and forth,
in order to just monitor your situation,
and that can be dangerous.
So Navdy, they came out with this Head-Up Display,
a couple years ago actually,
just solely for the fact of
try to keep you safe on the road,
because everyone starts to use their phones, and all that.
So they have some really innovative solutions here,
and I recently got a chance to check one out,
so I want to share that experience with you,
and help you decide if this is right for your current car,
and/or in your Model 3 when that comes out,
or whenever you receive yours here,
hopefully starting in 2017.
So from the get-go,
the Navdy is a really well-built product.
All the pieces are really clean and well-designed,
the packaging looks beautiful, a lot of the things are
accessories that come in addition with it,
so when I was unboxing it, I was looking for,
you know, what's this really gonna be like in my car?
And it turned out to fit really, really well
without any of the extra pieces needed,
but they do ship it with some additional components
that you may want if you have a very
different kind of dashboard, and we'll see what
the dashboard on the Model 3 is gonna be like.
During installation, I, typical male,
just ignored the instructions completely,
tried to plug it in and figure it all out,
and it worked.
Surprisingly, it worked well.
The hardware aspect of it seems to be beautifully done.
It sit perfectly on top of my dash,
right above my actual display,
where I do have a digital display in my Model S.
And it all plugged in perfectly, and I was really surprised,
because I didn't think that the Tesla had a OBD-II port.
The OBD-II sensors are ones that were made for
checking the oxygen levels in your exhaust,
and ever since 1997, is something that any car
newer than that has to have them, it's a law,
or at least here in California, it is.
So I was surprised to find that Tesla had one,
but there it is!
And using the little components
they have to hide the wire and plug it all in,
I literally took five minutes,
without reading any instructions or anything,
plugged it right in, and it just worked.
So out of the box, the Navdy worked really well,
and I was really pleasantly surprised with the set-up of it.
After the initial set-up is when I had to start
configuring the thing, so I had to download the app.
With the app installed, I had to sign in and allow it,
all of these things, to take photos, to use the mic,
to access my calls and contacts,
all the kind of stuff that you need to do
with any device that's accessing your,
basically using your phone in that way.
And so I have an Android phone,
I'm assuming it's gonna be very similar on iPhone,
where you have to basically allow all the permissions.
But then once you're there, you have the Navdy app,
and it tries to walk you through everything.
And I found this to be a little bit clunky.
So part of the set-up is to understand how gestures work.
One of Navdy's cool features is that you can use gestures,
you can wave your hand left or right,
in order to accept a call or read a message,
or you know, prompt for a few different things.
And then you have the steering wheel component
that you can use, kind of, as a button.
And that button has a scroll wheel,
and a big button in the middle that is pretty
multifunctional, it serves a lot of different purposes.
So during the set-up, they're trying to walk you through
all these things and I couldn't quite
figure out the gestures.
You go to the screen, and it just shows left and right,
so I just bring that up, because I think that the UI
is a bit clunky right now, but it's certainly something
that I'm sure that they can improve upon.
And in fact, after actually getting it up and running,
I didn't have any of those issues.
So you can almost skip the set-up, or at least,
I skipped it, except for one part,
and the one part confused me,
so I would just recommend skipping it altogether
if you're more technical and these things are
kind of second nature to you.
So driving with the Navdy, it first is a little odd.
It sits almost right in your line of sight,
so right where you'd be looking.
And that's intentional, because
that's where they display everything,
and it's kind of like a hologram that sits a few feet out
in front of your car when you're doing it,
so it works well, in terms of what it's doing,
but I think my first couple drives,
I was much more focused on the Navdy
than the cars in front of me, which can be really dangerous,
so at first, it took a little getting used to.
Now, I'm not as focused on it,
after having it for a couple days,
and being able to shoot and kind of see,
just get a sense of when to focus in on what's there,
and when not to.
So that was my very first impression of it,
was it was a little distracting,
but really cool in what it did.
One of the features about the Navdy that I liked
was that it was better in terms of the navigation,
than the Tesla navigation, the built-in stuff.
Now, with the Model 3,
it's gonna be a different animal, right?
Because you won't have that thing right in front of you,
but on the Model S and X, inside of that car dashboard,
the one right behind the steering wheel,
it changes to the turn-by-turn directions
when you're in Navigation mode,
so it kind of does everything that the Navdy does as well.
But the Navdy, I found, is a little bit better.
And there's one little caveat,
which it tells me what the road upcoming is.
Whereas my Tesla doesn't do that.
On the big display, it tells me the next turn.
But when I'm doing turn-by-turn inside of the dash there,
it shows me the route, it doesn't tell me what the road is
for me to turn on, until I'm almost right on top of it.
So I really liked how Navdy's navigation works.
I don't know, if as a Model S owner,
it's enough to make me wanna get it,
because it does seem kind of redundant.
It has almost all the same stuff
that my Model S has built-in.
But it is something I wanna give them credit for,
that they did a really great job with that.
Now Navdy integrates with different messaging apps,
so as you receive messages,
you can have a couple different things,
they're called Glances,
where the message will come in, and I use Whatsapp,
Facebook Messenger and SMS.
And so, I set it up in the app,
so any one of those will pop up
and give me what they call is a Glance,
and the Glance pops in and it shows you either the message,
or it just reads it out loud.
So they kind of don't want to show the whole message,
cause then you're reading the text,
so instead, the default is just read it to me out loud,
and I found that to be pretty good.
It works well, at least in my experience.
Then the question is, how do you reply?
Now this is where the UI could be a little bit clunky.
It took me a little while to figure out
how many times and where I had to click,
in order to actually send a reply via voice.
Now on Android, it uses Google Voice,
so I can control and do everything like I could by saying
Okay Google to my phone, as I can through Navdy.
So it works really well,
but it did take me a little while to get it set up.
So again, nothing majorly wrong there,
but something they can improve upon
is some of the UI elements, to make it just really
more seamless, in terms of how to send and receive messages,
while you're driving, without having to, you know,
take your eyes off the road at all.
I really liked when a call came in,
and I had navigation going,
I could simply wave my hand to the left,
and it would answer the call,
or wave it to the right to ignore it.
So when you're in a call, you can end it
and use the scroll wheel to deal with those kind of things.
But the display itself still keeps your map
or whatever else you had there,
whether that was the dashboard,
which has things like your speed and all that kind of going,
or you know, music or whatever else you had up.
So the calling feature and how it integrates there,
without being totally disruptive,
I thought is a nice touch on the UI front.
So when it comes to using it to operate your phone,
it turned out to be pretty simple, once I figured it out.
You hold the button down for two seconds,
and it'll automatically go to Google Now for me,
or Siri if you're an iPhone user.
And from there, you can use your phone in that way.
And Google Now's version of this is tremendous,
so I can do tons of things, like open my podcast app
and play my favorite podcast, or send a message on Whatsapp,
so it's really, really flexible in that regard.
This is something that I feel my Tesla Model S
has been missing, and I think it would be fairly easy
for them to integrate the two things,
but it's something that Navdy will give you that,
even if in your Model 3, you wanna use the built-in one
and it does a decent job, this is gonna be better I think,
because your phone and Google and Siri are just far superior
to the built-in Tesla version of the voice commands.
I often find myself trying to use the Tesla voice commands,
and getting frustrated, because it doesn't do
nearly as many things as my phone does.
So the fact that I can integrate that,
and I just hold a button for two seconds,
without having to take my eyes off the road,
or my hands off the steering wheel, is really valuable.
I think that's a big plus on the Navdy side,
even if you are a Model S or X owner,
and you don't really need the dashboard side of it,
this is something that I found to be pretty nice.
One thing that was kind of strange is the Navdy
seemed to take over my car system.
In fact, it has this override setting,
so when it wants to tell me something,
it does it though the car's Bluetooth,
which is great, that's how I want it to work,
but it had this weird thing where it wouldn't
stop playing music, no matter what I did, so...
What's with the music?
As a Tesla owner, I have my display of the music
going in there, and I can hit Pause,
and it seemed that the Navdy didn't like me doing that,
so it would just kind of come on
and start playing the music over and over again.
So as long you're trying to do everything through the Navdy,
I think it works great.
But if you're trying to combine the built-in Tesla UI
with the Navdy functionality,
they seem to fight, I don't know.
There you have it, my review of the Navdy Head-Up Display,
and my final thoughts are basically this.
If you have a Model S or X,
I don't think you're gonna really want to shell out
the 500 bucks for this.
If you are in line for a Model 3,
or you have a different car, which doesn't have a really
advanced digital display dashboard that does things
like plays the music that's currently playing,
or shows navigation, or does any of the really advanced
cool stuff that the Tesla Model S and X already do
out of the box,
then the Navdy is gonna be an awesome,
awesome addition to your car.
Now, if you have a Model 3,
I think this will fit well with it,
depending on how the dashboard actually lays out
and how it fits.
As I mentioned before, there are lots of different levels
and ways you can use this,
but you can get it now, it's $499 retail,
and then you can switch it over to your other car,
literally like I said, it took no more than
five minutes for me to set it up.
So I'm hoping, I'm thinking that a lot of you
that have Model 3s are gonna want this.
And I would encourage you to,
if you can go find one on display somewhere, check it out.
Or you can order it through a link
in the description down below.
And let me know what you think,
let me know if you have one, as well.
I'd love to hear what your thoughts are on this.
So thanks for joining me yet again,
and I'll see you back here next time.
(soft music)