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A somewhat amusing moment was caught on camera at Tesla’s booth during the Geneva Motor show last week. A reporter from the German magazine Wirtschafts Woche was interviewing Tesla’s head in Germany and Switzerland Jochen Rudat, a rising-star in Tesla’s organisation after the company’s success in Switzerland.
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My skin crawls every time the press calls the Porsche Mission E a “Tesla Killer”, which is often. Of course, it could simply be attributed to “clickbaiting” since they rarely if ever base the statement on facts, but the notion is especially ridiculous because if anything, the Mission E actually validates Tesla’s lead.
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This afternoon Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference to explain the Autopilot features included in the update v7.0, which the company will start releasing tomorrow to Model S owners.

If you have been following our coverage of the beta Autopilot, you have a good idea of the capabilities of the system, but Musk revealed a few more details and explained Tesla’s approach to the release.
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Tesla owners should be receiving a pretty huge over the air update in the coming days which will enable a bunch of new functionality in the car. A Flickr user has updated the release notes. The biggie here is Wifi which allows the Tesla to connect to either a stationary wifi access point or tether to a mobile phone that may have a better signal than the HSPA network the Tesla attaches itself to.

Other new features include: Tow Mode, which allows you to put your car in neutral (wonder if this works in automatic car washes?), Auto screen clearing mode and accessing radio presets from the steering wheel.

Model S owners will also see improvements in Maps, Creep mode performance, additional driver profiles and another biggie: Improved power management when not in use.

The last one is huge because the Model S burns about 5 miles of charge per day in sleep mode, otherwise known as “Vampire mode”. Taking off a chunk of that will help it last a long time in storage without a recharge and stop the useless power drain.

Related articles

• Elon Musk talks about the Tesla Model S’s safety; Battery fire was statistical inevitability (electrek.co)
• Tesla to show off Model X at its new Palo Alto store this weekend? (electrek.co)
• Some observations on new Tesla Model X prototype shown at Palo Alto showroom (electrek.co)