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More news about v9 release

The wide release of v9 isn’t here yet but there is a lot of new information about it - as you will see by the amount of videos and photos below. Elon Musk said “Got to make sure we iron out the details though. Long tail of tricky edge cases”. Some news since last week are:

• Confirmation that EAP in v9 uses the repeater and the b pillar cameras.
• New neural network for the rearview camera. Rumors before v9 were that it wasn’t going to be used for EAP or FSD since it didn’t have any neural network, it seems like it is going to be used!
• ‘Navigate on AutoPilot’ but… ‘Automatic Lane Change’ is gone. The driver will have to do a single pull on the AP stalk to confirm the lane change. From there the car will turn on the blinker, change lanes, and turn it off.
• Allows lane changes at any speed (not just above 30mph), and will slow down and find a place in traffic to merge. appleguru used it today in heavy traffic to merge in moving 2-3mph and was really impressed.
• Uses maps to help with navigating tricky road sections.

These and much more on the TMC thread

Tesla v9 Beta: AP drive by nav feature

As we stated above “Auto Lane Change” isn’t getting shipped in the first release of v9 but here is an awesome video by dennis_d from TMC. These are his words:

“Car drives itself. Mad Max mode enabled. Turn confirmation is disabled. The car basically drives itself, whenever you see a blue line in the middle it’s driven by autopilot.

It actually drove pretty well, there were couple moments where I had to take over, cause I thought it going to do something stupid like turn between two cars in the very tight space (I was on Mad Max mode tho). Had two moments with phantom braking next to a track.

All the turns AP was doing itself, I didn’t touch the stalk. There were two moments with red lines where I wanted to overtake (red lines) but it seems to handle it like a boss.”

Early access program

There were a bunch of invites sent out to folks to be part of the Early Access Program between Monday and Tuesday. It’s the first time in a long time that we hear about new people invited to the program - we assume this was happening but people weren’t talking about it. Tesla also sent an email to all of them in cc (facepalm) and we counted ~2000 testers in the Early Access Program. We think Tesla is trying to complete all the hardware variations and some other scenarios so they can release updates with more confidence, which is pretty exciting!

Tesla, if you are there we would be more than happy to help testing future firmware, just send us an invite. Pleeeeeease ;)

Read more: TMC Forum

Model 3 v9 dash cam footage

The dash cam feature includes one camera and no sound but the quality of the image in the video is pretty good. Some people say it’s using the narrow camera to compensate for the lack of definition on the other cameras. The narrow camera has better quality but it lacks some wider angle. Judge it yourself.

Do you need wi-fi for downloading new firmware?

There are a bunch of theories about what is necessary and what is not to download new software. Thanks to dennis_d and XXX - who have root access to their cars - we got some insights about how downloading new firmware works. Here are some of the details:

• Tesla pushes a job ’ firmware update’ to your car, the job says that it needs to wait for wifi to start the download process, the job usually says for how long it needs to wait for the wifi to start the download. After that date, the firmware can download over LTE.
• If ‘Energy Saving Mode’ is enabled the car needs to be charging - maybe plugged does the trick? - or it would only download data 1 hour at the time, we assume to let the car sleep in between downloads.

Note: Map updates are different, they require wifi.

Read more: TMC Forum thread and thread

Controlling the media from the app

Last week we talked about one of the new additions to v9 which is controlling the media from the mobile app. BigD0g shows us the controls from the app that make that possible.

Read more: TMC Forum

V9 Mobile app to car sharing

We find this feature super useful, so we don’t have to be creating calendar events or manually typing the address in the car. We can finally share the address via the phone, woohoo!

Precondition battery

Winter is coming and with that some rough times for batteries. Here are some tips from Tam about Teslas and cold weather.

Read more: TMC Forum