Most of the pieces of Elon Musk’s Master Plan, Part Deux are already in place. Tesla’s mass-market cars, the Model 3 and Model Y, have already been released. The Solar Roof is finally seeing a ramp. And the release of a feature-complete version of the company’s Full Self-Driving suite seems to be drawing closer.
For Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite to be feature-complete, the electric car maker would need to master inner-city driving. FSD already works for highway driving with Navigate on Autopilot with automatic lane changes. But when it comes to inner-city streets, Full Self-Driving still has some ways to go. Fortunately, if Tesla’s v10.2 2020.12.5 release is any indication, it appears that more and more aspects of city driving are becoming recognized by the company’s neural networks.
Tesla owner Roger McMorrow recently shared a short clip from his Model 3 while he was waiting at a stop light. Stop light recognition has been around for some time, with vehicles even recognizing the color of the lights at any given time. But after updating to v10.2 2020.12.5, the Model 3 owner noticed that the stop lights rendered on his vehicle’s display were a bit different. They were displaying the arrows in directional lights as well.
McMorrow only shared a brief glimpse of his experience, but it appears that both green and yellow arrows can be displayed on the Model 3 screen. In a way, this seems to be a pretty minor update overall, but when it comes to Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving suites, it is the iterative improvements that make the difference. This is true for many of the FSD’s driving visualizations, from traffic cones and poles to the different types of vehicles rendered on the display.
In a recent tweet, Elon Musk mentioned that the release of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving functionalities is still looking good for this year. This bodes well for the electric car maker’s Autopilot and FSD suite, both of which have pretty much become a trademark of Tesla. Vehicles that are manufactured today, after all, are made to eventually be autonomous in the future. The company’s creation of its Hardware 3 computer is a testament to this initiative.
But before Teslas can perform tasks like navigating from a suburb to the highway and back, little refinements have to be rolled out to the fleet. An update that features arrows in directional stop lights may be pretty minor in the grand scheme of things, but they do form an important part of the overall Full Self-Driving suite puzzle.
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