11 days ago, Elon Musk said that Tesla’s highly anticipated 8.1 software update will come in “about 10 days”. Today, he updated the ETA to next “Tuesday-Wednesday”, but owners don’t have their hopes up since the update has been delayed on several occasions since last December.
What is still unclear is if the update will also bring the second generation Autopilot to feature parity with the first generation Autopilot or if it will only be UI updates for the entire fleet.
In the past, the CEO has linked the 8.1 update with Autopilot 2.0 improvements to bring the system to parity with the first generation, but they have been pushing those updates in iterations of 8.0.
The latest update still has speed limit restrictions and the overall quality is not yet to parity with Autopilot 1.0.
We asked Musk to clarify if 8.1 next week will have feature parity, but we don’t have an answer yet:
can you clarify if 8.1 will also bring HW2 to feature parity with HW1 or it's just a UI upgrade for everyone?
— Fred Lambert (@FredericLambert) March 23, 2017
Musk said before that 8.1 was delayed due to the fact that the team was working on improving Autopilot 2.0 software and therefore, which ever comes first (8.1 or Autopilot 2.0 feature parity), the other one shouldn’t be far behind.
Beyond Autopilot and UI improvements, 8.1 was also associated with Tesla’s new mobile app overhaul, but they ended up releasing it last month before 8.1 was ready.
The update 8.1 is also expected to upgrade Tesla’s operating system with the new Linux kernel and introduce several UI improvements, especially a better usable internet browser has been promised. As we recently reported, less than 30% of Tesla drivers use their in-car internet browser on a monthly basis.
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