Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long been promising a highly anticipated revamped navigation and maps engine for the company’s fleet of electric vehicles and it is apparently finally coming this weekend.
It’s a complete new overhaul of the system that Tesla has been working on for a while now.
We have been reporting on unreleased iterations of it since last summer.
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
Earlier this month, Musk also said that it was “almost done” and last night, he added that it is coming “this weekend” and elaborated on the capacity to improve with the new engine:
New nav starts rolling out this weekend. Should be considered a mature beta at first, so won’t be perfect, but will improve rapidly. With the old system, we were stuck with legacy 3rd party black box code and stale data. No way to improve.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2018
We will look out for the update this upcoming weekend.
Electrek’s Take
As Seth and I discussed in the last episode of the Electrek Podcast, I have never experienced a problem with Tesla’s navigation system until the very last update two weeks ago.
I had always heard about these stupid routing suggestions and unnecessary detours that Tesla’s navigation system would often suggest, but I had never experienced it myself after using the system hundreds of time.
But for some reason, it happened several times following the last update. I am talking about things like taking me off the highway and right back on it for no reason and other nonsensical routes.
I wasn’t that excited about this update, but now I see why people were asking for it.
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