Skip to content

Feature · Turn-by-turnAlpha

Turns, called like pace notes.

codriver is growing its own turn-by-turn guidance: maneuver arrows, distances, and a live ETA, delivered the way a rally co-driver calls the road: what's coming, how far, then out of the way. It's early. This page is honest about what works today and what's still cooking.

Planning a long EV trip with charge stops? That's A Better Route Planner's strength. Plan there, drive with codriver.

The codriver navigation card on a Tesla screen: the next manoeuvre, its distance counting down, and the one that follows underneath, above the route and the trip strip.The codriver navigation card on a Tesla screen: the next manoeuvre, its distance counting down, and the one that follows underneath, above the route and the trip strip.
One maneuver at a time: the distance to it, the instruction, and the one that follows. Under it, the destination with the time and the distance still to run.
The codriver navigation card approaching a junction, with a lane strip below the manoeuvre showing which of the four lanes takes the turn.The codriver navigation card approaching a junction, with a lane strip below the manoeuvre showing which of the four lanes takes the turn.
At a junction that offers a choice, the strip under the manoeuvre lights the lanes that take your turn — so you move across before you are on top of it, not after.

What “alpha” means here

Real, and honestly rough around the edges.

The core loop ships today: pick a destination, get pace-note turns with distances and a live ETA, and reroute automatically if you go off-line. What's still being tuned is the long tail: unusual junctions, phrasing, and the polish that separates “works” from “flawless”. We'd rather ship it labeled alpha and improve it in the open than pretend it's finished. Tesla's built-in nav remains the mature router; codriver's is the lightweight, in-layer option that keeps you in the community map.

How it works today

The parts that already work.

Pace-note banner

One maneuver at a time: an arrow, the instruction, and the distance to it. Drawn as vector glyphs so it's crisp on any Tesla screen, and phrased like a co-driver's call, not a paragraph to read.

Live ETA strip

Arrival time, time remaining, and distance to go, updated as you drive. Glanceable numbers in the corner, answering the questions a passenger actually asks.

Cost-aware reroute

Drift off the line for more than a moment and it recalculates; it also refreshes on long legs. Tuned not to twitch, it re-plans when it matters, not at every wobble.

The road ahead, in order

Every turn on the leg, before you need it.

Behind the single active call is the whole sequence: each maneuver with its glyph and the distance out. When a route has alternatives, you pick the line you want before you roll; from there codriver just calls it. Think co-driver reading ahead, not a screen you stare at.

More on the pace-note idea →

The codriver route picker on a Tesla screen: each alternative with its time, its usual time, its distance and how many alerts are on it, the quickest already selected, and a Go button that counts itself down.The codriver route picker on a Tesla screen: each alternative with its time, its usual time, its distance and how many alerts are on it, the quickest already selected, and a Go button that counts itself down.
Every alternative, with its time against the time it usually takes, its distance, and how many alerts sit on it. The quickest is pre-selected and the button counts itself down, so doing nothing still gets you moving.

FAQ

Fair questions about an alpha

Is codriver's turn-by-turn ready to rely on?

It's in alpha. The core loop works today: you can route to a place, get maneuver-by-maneuver pace notes with distances and a live ETA, and it reroutes if you go off-course. But it's young: edge cases, unusual junctions, and some phrasings are still being tuned, so keep your judgment in the loop and treat it as a capable co-pilot, not an infallible one.

How is it different from Tesla's built-in navigation?

Tesla's nav is the mature, full-featured router; for door-to-door driving it's excellent and we don't try to replace it. codriver's turn-by-turn rides inside the browser layer alongside the community map and charger layer, and it's framed as pace notes: distances over chatter, calm cadence, no nagging. Today it's a lightweight alternative that keeps you in codriver's world; it isn't trying to out-feature the built-in nav.

Does it plan EV charging stops for me?

Not yet, and we won't pretend it does. codriver routes you to a destination and calls the turns; it does not (today) plan battery-aware, multi-stop charging trips. For that, A Better Route Planner is the gold standard and pairs perfectly: plan the charge stops in ABRP, then drive with codriver's pace notes and every-network charger layer. Battery-aware routing is on our roadmap, not shipped.

How does rerouting work?

Patiently, by default. You have to be 300 metres off the planned line and stay there for three consecutive fixes before codriver re-plans, and a cooldown has to pass before it will do it again — so one bad GPS reading in an urban canyon doesn't buy a reroute. It also refreshes periodically on long legs. That restraint is deliberately cost-aware (routing calls aren't free), and it is yours to change: Reroute sensitivity in Settings runs from eager to relaxed, so you can have it recover sooner after a missed turn, or fuss even less than it already does.

Does it speak the turns, or is it only arrows?

It speaks. Announcements are stitched together at play time from recorded clips — “In 400 metres, turn left. Then, turn right.” — and the clips are recorded per language, so a French driver hears French. The voice is deliberately calm and distance-first rather than chatty: what's coming, how far, then quiet. They are recordings rather than the browser's own speech synthesis for a specific reason: Tesla's browser ships the Web Speech API with no voices installed, so synthesis would have been silent in the car and somebody else's voice entirely on a desktop. Guidance sound starts switched off while navigation is in alpha — instructions can still be wrong, and we would rather you chose to be told than be told wrongly. The maneuver glyphs are still drawn as inline vector arrows, crisp whatever fonts the car has: the arrow is what you glance at, the voice is what means you don't have to.

Want the mature planner for charge-stop trips? See codriver vs A Better Route Planner. They're built to work together.

Try the alpha in your Tesla.

Every feature free during the beta, no card. Tell us where it's rough; that's how it gets better.