Version 9

3 simultaneous apps on V9, woot?!

It clearly seems like an unintended feature (A.K.A. bug) because it goes away if you then start the navigation, of if you don’t have the camera up and start backing up. But one can only dream that Tesla would bring something like that to the Model S and Model X, this would be superior to the previous “split screen” if they let people re-arrange them.

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

First pictures of an early version of v9

This is what Jason Hughes reported:

• Split screen is gone in this build, no more two apps at the same time with the maps always visible
• Nav waypoints
• A new option that says ‘Drive on Nav’
• The UI os now unified with the Model 3
• Maps are always on display
• IC shows a more pulled back view, probably to show cars on the blind spots
• MAME (Arcade simulator)
• No Dash cam feature noted (at least on initial look)

Read more: TMC Forum

Here’s how Tesla’s new dash cam feature using Autopilot cameras works

The leaked images of v9 don’t have any trace of the promised dashcam. However, according to Electrek’s source, there are two versions of the new update rolling out. Here are some details:

• This feature would only be available in vehicles with AP2.5
• You need a small USB flash drive and it needs to be formatted in FAT32
• When recording, it seems it records for an hour before overwriting old videos

Reading the notes my take is this is an MVP, in the future I’d assume that they’ll include things like cloud storage, more than one hour of video, recording when the car is in park, etc. As a software person myself I like iterative development and I hope they keep on adding to it in the near future.

Read more: Electrek

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

Neural Network changes in V9

jimmy_d shared another spectacular analysis of the NN on v9. His first post analyses the NN called AKNET_V9. Here are some details but you should go and read the original post on TMC:

• One unified camera network handles all 8 cameras vs. a sepate network per camera on previous versions
• Same weight file being used for all cameras (this has pretty interesting implications and previously v8 main / narrow seems to have had separate weights for each camera)
• Full resolution for the 3 front cameras and back camera (1280x960) and 1/2 the resolution for pillar and repeater cameras (640x480)
• All cameras analyze 2 frames at the same time (most likely so each camera can see motion)
• The size of the network makes jimmy_d wonder the amount of training data that Tesla is using in their backend and if they are manually tagging all the images since it seems a ton of manual labor, on his own words “there aren’t enough humans to label this much data”
• I really like his closing statement As a neural network dork I couldn’t be more pleased."

In a later post jimmy_d mentions that AKNET_V9 might not be the network that’s currently driving the car since he thinks it’s too big to run on HW2 or HW2.5. His best guess is that it can only run at 3 fps and that doesn’t seem fast enough to be usable. However, it seems posible that this is the network that FSD is using since in HW3 it could run at 30 fps. The current firmware includes a number of different NN and it doesn’t seem easy to understand what is use and what is not, a bunch of the NN that are there are at evolution of what we got in 8.1 but AKNET_V9 seems a completely different beast.

As always, it is delightful to read you jimmy_d, keep up the good work!

Read more: TMC Forum

Seeing the world in Autopilot V9 (part three)

If you’ve been following Tesletter or almost any Tesla forum or blog for sometime you probably already know who verygreen is (or greentheonly depending on the forum) and how much awesome information he is revealing from his car. This time he is back with a follow-up on what AP v9 seems. He has capture six of the cameras and the information that they detect. As always, this is awesome, great job verygreen!

In a second video we can see how AP can’t see a tire in the middle of the road, so please always be careful while using Autopilot!

Seeing the world the wrong way in v9

Verygreen is back, this time he got a video of how v9 sees the world in right hand drive countries. This one is from Japan.

Software update process from the app in V9

Explained by beastpilot: “You get a normal notification, then in the app you can trigger it. Once you trigger it, you get ‘cancel update’ for 2 minutes, as well as a notification that a SW update is about to start. Once it starts the ‘cancel update’ goes away, and then you get a notification it finished once done.”

Read more: Reddit

Tesla added 3D bounding boxes in V9

verygreen and DamianXVI have been able to visualize and decipher data to confirm that V9 has 3D bounding boxes. Proof below. As always, thanks for sharing!

Read more: TMC Forum

v9 is rolling out to the fleet

v9 has started to roll out to the fleet this week with a couple of important announcements:

• Navigate on AutoPilot has been removed for now and it is on testing. It could be back in “a few weeks”
• The roll out is only happening in the US and Canada, it seems like Tesla needs to work on the translations and some other localization issues like right-hand drive

Read more: Tesla Blog

V9 maybe being released towards the end of September

It looks like v9 is not quite ready yet. Some lucky Tesla owners may be getting it in the next couple of weeks, but it looks like it probably won’t be released till the end of September, according to Elon’s tweet.

Read more: Twitter

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!

V9 released to early testers

Here are the highlights from the release notes and pictures:

• Model 3 gets calendar integration, energy graph, and web browser.
• EAP includes “tesla navigate on autopilot” (restricted to the US for now). When active, a single blue line indicates the path ahead, keeping your car in the lane. Gray lines highlight lane changes for a more efficient driving route. Navigate on Autopilot will also automatically steer toward and take the correct highway interchanges and exits based on your destination.
• Start navigation on your car by using the share button in your favorite apps on iOS. A.K.A. send addresses to the car!
• Passengers can control the media and cycle through their media favorites.
• Whenever there’s a software update available for your vehicle, you can conveniently start the update from your phone.
• Atari games.
• New application launcher that brings all the apps together in one place.
• No trace of the dash cam feature (but keep reading) :)
• Only in US, Canada, and Mexico: To improve Navigation’s ability to provide relevant instructions, select whether or not your vehicle is eligible for high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes. When enabled, Navigation routes you though HOV lanes. When disabled, Navigation avoids routing you through HOV lanes.

We can’t wait for v9 to be released to the people which according to a recent tweet from Elon can be as soon as at the end of the week!

All the release notes with all the variations by version and territory can be found here.

Read more: Twitter

Video streaming coming in Version 10

Youtube and Netflix may be present in Version 10 of the software, according to Elon Musk’s Twitter. However v9 it isn’t still out, and we have no idea when v10 will come out 

Read more: Twitter