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Issue 70 - Thanks JB

Thanks JB

JB Straubel is part of the founding team at Tesla and until last week he was the CTO of the company. JB and Elon meet in 2003 and joined Tesla after Elon invested in their series A. As Elon mentioned in the presentation of the quarter, “If we hadn’t had lunch in 2003, Tesla wouldn’t exist, basically”. JB is transitioning from being an executive to an advisory role, and honestly, no one can’t blame him for wanting a change after 15 years at the same company (and the company seems in good hands).

From Tesletter, we just wanted to thank JB - maybe someone can foward this to him? - for all his hard work and dedication, as Tesla owners and shareholders we love your work. From the bottom of our hearts: THANK YOU!

v10 is coming in the next months

Elon recently shared on Twitter some details about v10, the next big release of the software in our cars. Here is a summary of what he said:

  • To be released in August (if testing goes really well). But probably more like September.
  • It will include several games & infotainment features.
  • Ability to stream YouTube & Netflix when car is stopped.
  • Improved highway Autopilot and better traffic light & stop sign recognition. Are we going to see the first features of the FSD pack out to the fleet?
  • Will include a text message phone feature that reads messages through the speaker and can text back for you via voice.
  • After someone complained about chimes when the family is sleeping in the car, Elon said he is hopping to get “Joe Mode” in v10. “Joe Mode” would lower the volume of strident beeps & chimes by half.

Our only observation is that both the infotaiment features and new games are probably only going out to cars with MCU2. Elon repeated on Twitter that there will be a path for people with MCU1 to pay and get upgraded to MC2. We tried contacting Tesla and they said this isn’t out yet but they hinted it is in the works and more info will be released soon 🤞

Upgrading to FSD is now only $3,000 (if you had previously purchased EAP)

Elon mentioned it on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and it’s now official. If you had purchased Enhanced Autopilot, upgrading to Full Self-Driving is now $3,000. Or what it is the same $3,000 less than the current price of FSD ($3,000 happened to be the price of EAP if you got it when purchasing the car).

Expect this price to go up as FSD goes up, for instance, when FSD goes up to $7,000 in mid August, the upgrade from EAP will most likely be increased to $4,000.

Read more: Twitter

[Trick] How to review your Tesla Sentry clips faster

Thanks to Nate Mccomb for the trick.

“Sentry Mode saves 9 minutes prior to a trigger event and one minute after. You have to find that one minute mark, so if the latest front camera file in a folder is 42 seconds long then the event can be found at the 40-42 second mark on the previous clip.”

If you run Windows, Nate has created viewer that automatically puts you in the right spot so you can review the events quicker. You can get it here.

Read more: Twitter

2019.24.4 Dashcam USB notification

With 2019.24.4 Tesla introduced a couple of useful notifications for the Dashcam USB.

  • Your call will tell you when your USB is full:
  • If your USB is too slow to use this feature- this is somewhat common because we all have old USB drives sitting around- it’ll show the following message:

BTW If you are shopping for a new USB for your Tesla, maybe because you just learnt that yours is slow or because you need more space, I would recommend you to use the drives from PureTesla - they come pre-formatted and with the necessary folder- and I personally wouldn’t buy anything that is less than 128Gb.

Read more: Twitter

New solar and powerwall install with monitoring

By now, you probably know that we are big dorks ;) We truly like people doing stuff like this. This one is a dashboard built with a Raspberry Pi to monitor the solar and powerwall installs. Read the Reddit thread to learn all the details about it.

Read more: Reddit

Tesla to add chess to Tesla Arcade

According to Tesla’s Twitter account, last week they started rolling out chess to their Arcade Games. The new firmware also adds support for two controllers to Beach Buggy Racing.

Tesla Autopilot’s stop sign, traffic light recognition and response is operating in ‘Shadow Mode’

We’ve known for a while- thanks to greentheonly - that the current firmware includes stop sign and traffic light detection and reaction but it comes in disabled. Now, in the information released by Tesla about their Q2, we can read the following:

“We are making progress towards stopping at stop signs and traffic lights. This feature is currently operating in ‘shadow mode’ in the fleet, which compares our software algorithm to real-world driver behavior across tens of millions of instances around the world.”

Read more: Teslarati

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What the acronym?

As Tesla fan I find myself sometimes having to remember what are all those acronyms, here is a list of the ones you can find in this issue.

  • FSD - Full Self-Driving
  • MCU1 - Media Control Unit 1. Has an envidia NVIDIA Tegra-3 chip. All Model S and Model X built before end of March 2018 have this version.
  • MCU2 - Media Control Unit 2. Has a more powerful Intel x86_64 processor. All Model 3 have this version as well as the Model S and Model X built after end of March 2018.
  • EAP - Enhanced Autopilot
  • USB - Universal Serial Bus

Because we 💚 Tesla

Our Model S rocks so much that we designed some sweet t-shirts to go with it. Check out all of our designs at https://shop.spreadshirt.com/tesletter

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