Tesla owner stranded in desert after smartphone app failure

Last week a Tesla driver found himself stranded miles from home, in a desert, after a tech failure. The driver wanted to test the vehicle's keyless driving feature, which allows users to unlock the car and start its ignition using the Model S smartphone app. Using the app, drivers are able to gain access their car and drive it away even if they do not have the key on hand.

The driver, f took his wife and two dogs for a drive out into the desert near Las Vegas toward Red Rock Canyon to test the feature. Six miles from home he decided it was time to turn the car around and head home, but by mistake he got out of the car to adjust his dogs' bed. In the process, he inadvertently switched off the engine. He soon realised his mistake, as his smartphone no longer had any signal and could not start the car, or even unlock it.

The Tesla system, which controls remote unlocking and keyless starting communicates through the company's smartphone app back to Tesla's servers to issue command. The car also needs, the data service to receive commands from those same servers to unlock or start.

"Need to restart the car now, but, with no cell service, my phone can't connect to the car to unlock it. Even with cell service, the car would also need cell service to receive the signal to unlock," the Tesla owner Ryan Negri described the event on Instagram.

Negri's wife Amy had to walk two miles to get cell signals to and then call a friend to take her home to pick up the car keys.

Negri told Mashable in a message that he was aware that the mobile app would not start the car without cell signal, but forgot about the poor cell signal in the vicinity.