Tesla owners are getting software updates this weekend that are delivering new features to some of their vehicles. Today, a new software update began rolling out to consumer vehicles, 2023.44.30.1 known as the holiday update which also includes a new version of FSD Beta 11.4.9.
This release features a new feature called High Fidelity Park Assist.
The new feature displays a new 3D representation of the world around your vehicle, including the proximity and shape of nearby objects, barriers, vehicles, and painted road markings.
While we’d seen a leak of the release notes, today we now have videos from customers trying out the new feature. What is quite remarkable is the ability of the system to render the world around it, particularly, detailed parking bays on the ground below the vehicle, using just the existing 8 cameras around the car and computer vision AI to stitch it all together.
With news spreading of the update among the Tesla community, customers around the world are keen to get hands-on. So far at least, it seems the feature is only available for newer vehicles without ultrasonic sensors around the car.
Until now, these vehicles had lacked the precision in distance estimates achieved with older models, but from what we’ve seen today, this new update remedies that. There are now many examples of videos showing the car represent the distance between the car and the curb i.e. a mirror width away, as well as objects behind the car.
Outside making it up to new Tesla owners, it is not clear why ultrasonic Teslas would be excluded, similar to the smart shift feature that could also be offered to existing HW3/HW4 vehicles.
The ability for the car to render objects around the vehicle now extends to the Y-axis. This means objects like walls are actually rendered as a solid wall, rather than the car mistaking it for long, tall objects like a bus. Telsa drivers with the feature will now have 3 sources of data to refer to when moving the vehicle in tight spaces, the 3D representation of Park Assist, the camera feeds also on the screen, and the obvious option to look out the window, however your view is often obscured, making the first two a better option.
The system only begins once the driver engages reverse, however some videos suggest High Fidelity Park Assist remains active in Drive, at low speeds, like navigating in a carpark, but will return to the normal visualisation when you speed up.
Do you still have to park manually? Or can you tap a spot and have the car park for you?
Tesla currently has Autopark, this update doesn’t yet change that, but this lays the groundwork for what is referred to as ‘actually smart summon’ that will improve the autopark experience, in theory to the point where the car car reverse summon (go park itself).
Knowing where the parking bays are and which are available is key to this.
Cars without ultrasonic sensors (i.e. the newer ones), at least the Model 3, do not have auto park. I have a brand new Model 3 with FSD enabled and do not have about park
Jason, they keep saying “newer cars without USS” but in Australia even new cars still have USS installed on them (at least they did earlier this year).
Go take a look at the new Model 3.
Likely all this was already used by the car when auto park started being able to park i. Empty spots i.e. didn’t have to be adjacent to an already parked car.. Iterative improvement and now the ux now shows this visualization the car uses to those that don’t have uss which now can be used by the driver in turn training the ai towards the actual smart summon… Drive well folks to help train the ai faster and sooner towards fsd 👌