Tesla had more or less dedicated the month of June to the Plaid release. There was a special delivery event for this high-performance variant of the Model S. Most of the news articles came from that event. Amidst all that, the upcoming release of the Full Self-Driving (FSD) Suite’s newest version was forgotten. This will be a wide release, as Tesla aims to make the FSD Beta version available to a much larger audience.
There will be some other interesting updates accompanying the FSD wide release as well. Model 3 and Model Y, Tesla’s lower-end vehicles in terms of price, will get the updated user interface from the Plaid version of Model S. Vehicles with Tesla’s Hardware 3 computer will also get some new visualizations.
Updated UI Coming To Model 3 and Model Y
As always, the public got to know this bit of news through Tesla’s unofficial communication channel – Elon Musk’s Twitter account. A Tesla enthusiast had asked if Model 3 and Model Y vehicles will get the updated software and UI from Plaid. CEO Musk then replied that they would receive this update with the wide release of the FSD suite. Of course, this wide release has been “a couple of weeks away” for the last few months.
Musk also revealed that all cars with the FSD computer will have a new “mind of car” view. All vehicles at the moment may not have the FSD computer, but owners can upgrade their vehicles to get the Hardware 3 computer.
Yes, updated UI coming with FSD wide release. All cars with FSD computer will have new “mind of car” view. All 3/Y can be upgraded to have FSD computer.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 6, 2021
Tesla has actually equipped every vehicle with the FSD computer since April 2019. Given that the company launched the Model Y post this, it seems surprising that Musk mentioned “Model Y can be updated” as well. After all, every Model Y must be having an FSD computer. Right?
Tesla FSD Wide Release
Musk recently admitted that self-driving, especially in generalized conditions, is harder than expected. Of course, many experts already knew this, and they have been mocking Tesla’s over-optimistic timeline of achieving complete autonomy by the year’s end. However, Musk keeps affirming that it will happen. The FSD 9 Beta version is shipping soon, according to the CEO.
Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear!
Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect.
Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 3, 2021
Of course, there isn’t a lot of clarity as to exactly which “FSD wide release” Musk is talking about. The Version 11 software update has been a hot topic at the moment. Tesla owners believe that this update will also include the FSD Beta Version 9 update. But again, Musk hasn’t provided a timeline on either of these.
Our Opinion
Tesla recently removed radar sensors from Model 3 and Model Y vehicles. This means that the entire FSD suite will function on an artificial-intelligence-based pure-vision approach. This could be the reason behind the delay of the Version 9 update, especially since Musk himself has acknowledged the complexity. The new UI is simply a part of the software development of the company, and it was just a matter of time before Tesla made it standard.