We have been reporting on details of Tesla’s new in-house navigation and maps engine for the better part of a year now and back in December, CEO Elon Musk said that it was ‘light years ahead’ of the current system and coming in ‘early 2018’.
Now a few months into 2018, Musk says that the upgrade is ‘almost done’.
Back in July, we reported that Tesla is working on revamping its maps and navigation system with its own maps using new open source modules from MapBox and Valhalla.
The new map system called ‘Tesla Maps’ was discovered by friend of the site and Tesla hacker verygreen who was able to enable it in his car and gave us our first look at Tesla’s new map system.
Later in 2017, we came out with another report after he discovered a new map module in Tesla’s 2017.44 software update called ‘Vector Maps’. The main difference seems that it enables a significantly more important zoom and smoother engine.
The first picture is the current maximum zoom and the other two pictures are of the same location but zoomed in with the new Vector Maps enabled:
That’s on the Google Map application on the center display, but verygreen also told us that the navigation system on the instrument cluster also appears to be “smoother and more detailed” than under the current version.
As for navigation, Tesla has been working on a new routing engine, but the differences with the current systems are not clear.
Though we often get anecdotal reports of bad route planning from Tesla’s current system, which is likely an area where they could improve with the new system.
A few months ago, Musk said that new system was ‘light years ahead’ of the current version:
Major navigation overhaul coming in early 2018. Will be light-years ahead of current system, but we are testing it rigorously before rolling out.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 21, 2017
And during a series of tweets last night, he updated an owner on Twitter about the timeline – saying that it is ‘almost done’:
Almost done
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 4, 2018
Musk also reiterated that development of several anticipated features has slowed down as Tesla’s software team focuses on Model 3 software, which was far from completed even after Tesla started production and deliveries back in July.
He said that a fix to Tesla’s few media app bugs should be coming too – though that has apparently been in the work for years now with still some recurring issues for some owners.
As we reported last week, Tesla also started beta-testing a new Autopilot update with new feature and more advanced neural net.
It looks like Tesla owners might get quite a few significant software updates relatively soon.
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