So in 16 years, they produced two games and a remaster. Am I missing something? Of course you can’t keep a business alive when it doesn’t actually make anything.

And that’s becoming it’s own problem with search, especially with technical questions. The good answer is also old and out of date.

Honestly, I think some of it is a bit over the top. At the end of the day, they’re a company producing a product and not the chosen savior. But as far as giant companies go, they’re almost everything you could want.

• Lots of pro-consumer policies. From making returns a thing, to never taking away access like some stores, to big sales. If the idea of buying a digital game in 2004 and still having access to it in 2024 doesn’t sound revolutionary to you, it’s because you haven’t paid attention to how other companies run their stores.

• Open source contributions. Gaming on Linux is getting a huge shot in the arm from Valve, Steam, and the Steam Deck, both through direct contributions and indirectly through showing it’s viability.

• Employees, by all accounts, are well taken care of and enjoy their jobs.

They aren’t perfect, but the bar for a company, especially in the gaming industry, being ethical is so low that the way Valve operates makes them basically saints by comparison.

“Clean house” feels optimistic. Standard procedure for a buy out:

• Executives are retained or let go with generous packages
• Middle management is summarily executed
• Someone sorts a spreadsheet of developers by salary and lays off the highest paid (and sometimes best, though no telling when we’re talking about these two garbage fires)
• Remaining developers are shuffled. Some are asked to move to teams that are doing wildly different things than what they were doing before. Some teams are filled with lower cost “resources” from other countries.

It’s a bit of both! Certain commands to the car can be done locally via Bluetooth OR via Tesla servers. The tricky bit is that status always comes from the server. If you are on a VPN that is blocked (like I use NordVPN and it is often blocked) then the app can’t get status and as long as it can’t get status it may not even try a local command. It’s unclear to me under what circumstances it does local vs cloud commands, and it may have to do with a Bluetooth LE connection that you can’t really control.

When you don’t have service, or you’re on VPN, it may be worthwhile to try disabling and reenabling Bluetooth. I have had success with this before. If you’re using android, it seems like the widget also uses Bluetooth, so you could try adding the widget to your home screen and using that. You can also try setting the Tesla app to not be power controlled, so it never gets closed.

Either way, there’s a definite engineering problem here that feels like it should be fixed by Tesla. But I can at least confirm that, even in situations with zero connectivity, you should be able to perform basic commands like unlock and open trunk without data service.