Saturday, January 14, 2017

Tesla Model S - Third Software Update

This Thursday, I received another software update for the Model S. The build number was 2.50.201 which is weird since I see at least 3 other "newer" builds for cars with different configurations. Anyway, after installing the update Thursday night, I took the car out in the rain to the local SuperCharger and back to see if the camera will finally calibrate. It did.

Friday morning, on the way to work, both TACC (traffic-aware cruise control) and auto-steer was working, though auto-steer had a 35 mph limit. I think the car is still calibrating since the auto-steer did not seem very stable; the car seems to weave from side to side in the lane.

TACC is pretty cool. I use cruise control a lot when I drive so I was disappointed that it was disabled while the car was calibrating cameras. Now, the car will slow down and speed up (even stop) with traffic. It helps with enduring the long daily commute. There are also some minor strange behavior issues but hopefully they will be worked out in later releases.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Tesla Model S - Another Software Update

Frustrating.

Elon promised Autopilot software for new cars with AP 2.0 hardware and so I got a software update notice for the car last night at ~10pm. Supposedly I'm one of ~1000 people that got the update. Of course I ran to the garage to install it. The release notes said that frontal collision warning, traffic-aware cruise control (TACC), and low-speed auto-steering was added. How exciting!

After the install, I went out for a test drive at ~3:30am. I drove for about 15 minutes and nothing worked. I kept getting a warning message that the cameras were calibrating. This morning, I drove to church and back... and still nothing. Cameras are still calibrating. Of course there is no explanation of the calibration process and any indication of progress. Worse, since TACC function supersedes the original manual cruise control, that doesn't work either. So, my car is less functional than before the software update. What?

I complain about Apple's updates all the time since about 1/3 of the time, the update resets my iOS device and I have to restore from backup. Now I'm wondering about Tesla's QA process. Did they push out unfinished/untested software to 1000 cars so they can recognize $5M of revenue (1000 cars x $5000 for enhanced auto-pilot) for Q4? The cars and technology is cool, but Tesla's communications is terrible.

Bing Bing - AOA


[MV] Bing Bing - AOA