We first told you last week that Tesla was going to be implementing some new visualizations to identify other Tesla vehicles with the correct model and colour, instead of general automaker-neutral vehicles.
It appears Tesla may implement this feature sooner than thought, as resident hacker @greentheonly has found evidence of it in the source code of the upcoming 2020.32 update.
What’s important to note in his findings is that a future update will also include visualizations for service vehicles like ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, and new “construction” visualizations.
It looks like Tesla is planning (already doing?) display of (recognized) Tesla cars on autopilot cars visualization as such. Keep your eye on it?
Also no models yet but coming later:
Ambulance, Fire truck, Police car and "construction" pic.twitter.com/pdnJVV8Dwz— green (@greentheonly) August 9, 2020
While the visualizations for Tesla vehicles serves no real purpose other than being fun, the identification of service vehicles could be an important safety upgrade. How many times have you been driving along when out of nowhere you suddenly see an ambulance behind you with its lights on? In the future your Tesla could recognize and identify it for you, either with on-screen or audible alerts, before you even know it’s coming.
This enhancement is just another sign of how Tesla’s recognition system is improving as the fleet of vehicles collect more data. The visualizations might be just that, but it shows the system is able to recognize more distinct objects, and will be able to respond appropriately to its surrounding environment.
Remember how excited you were when Tesla added traffic cones to the visualizations? With the addition of “construction” visualizations, it’s now going to be even more fun driving through a construction zone.
