Tesla has added a new feature to the in-car service menu, allowing owners to select between winter or summer tires based on what is currently running on the vehicle.
The feature updates the car’s settings based on which tire type is selected, and also can get rid of the rear tread depth too low message, but doesn’t appear to have been rolled out to all vehicles yet.
Accessible from the ‘Wheel & Tire Configuration’ menu option under ‘Service,’ there are now two tabs to select from – Wheels and Tires.
The ‘Wheels’ option has seen no changes, and still allows you to select between 18″ Aeros, 19″ Sport, or other wheel types available from Tesla.
The new section is ‘Tires’ which now allows you to select between ‘Winter’ and ‘All Season or Summer’ tires.
According to the menu, Tesla advises you to “run this configuration after each tire rotation or replacement to optimize your drive.” Running the configuration will also get rid of the low tread depth alert message that was added last year.
Once you have changed your tire type, Tesla also advises to “limit hard acceleration in the first few minutes of driving to ensure vehicle calibration.”
Unfortunately the menu option, nor the owner’s manual, reveals what calibration happens or what settings change as a result of switching between the two tire types, but we have some guesses.
The first is that it likely takes into account different recommended tire pressures between summer and winter tires. Tesla recently added the ability to see when your tire pressures were last read, and at the same time added the recombed cold tire pressures.
It could also take into account the differing levels of rolling resistance of winter tires compared to summer or all-season tires when calculating range or energy consumption estimates.
As noted above, it appears this feature hasn’t rolled out to all cars. We spotted it on our Model 3 with Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta, which is still running on the .20 software update branch, so we believe it was added in that version.
However, the feature was not available on our Model Y running 2022.28.200. We have also checked with some of our readers who also have Model Ys, but on 2022.36,
and they also don’t have it, so this might only have been added to the Model 3 so far.
Let us know in the comments below if you have it, along with what model and which software version you are running.
