Tesla Launches Safety Score v1.2, Adds Trip Breakdown and More

By Lennon Cihak
V1.2 of Safety Score is here
V1.2 of Safety Score is here
Drive Tesla Canada

Tesla has updated its Safety Score feature to version 1.2, which adds late-night driving as a factor, among other things.

Since the Safety Score feature launched, Tesla has had a handful of improvements. Version 1.2, however, is the function's biggest update yet. This update will hopefully address a number of the concerns drivers were having before about how the score was calculated.

Tesla uses the Predicted Collision Formula (PCF) to calculate all of the above factors. This formula predicts how many car accidents may happen per 1 million miles driven.

This new version 1.2 adds features like a visualization of your trip (without location data to protect privacy), Late Night Driving and an increased grace period from three to five seconds.

Here is a list of the changes to Safety Score:

  • Provided a visualization of your trip, as a timeline, to show when specific events that impacted your Safety Score occurred. To protect your privacy, no location data is provided.
  • Added Late Night Driving as a new Safety Factor. More time spent driving at night will lead to a lower Safety Score.
  • Increased grace period after Autopilot disengages from 3 seconds to 5 seconds.
  • Updated hard braking and aggressive turning Safety Factors to count the number of events instead of the duration of events.
  • Updated Forward Collision Warning rate Safety Factor to calculate the rate of warnings per 1,000 miles driven while not using Autopilot.
  • Updated Safety Score to use the miles-weighted average of the last 30 day’s Safety Scores, ignoring any miles driven on Autopilot.

One of the biggest upgrades to version 1.2 is the addition of Late Night Driving. Tesla notes in their blog post that, “Late Night Driving is defined as the number of seconds you spend driving at night (10pm - 4am) divided by the number of seconds you spend driving total in the day.” Although Late Night Driving is capped at 29.3% of your total score.

The reason Tesla has added this as a safety factor is that driving at night can be more dangerous due to reduced visibility, tiredness, and distractions.

According to the National Safety Council, most fatal accidents occur between 4pm and 11:59pm, with Friday, Saturday, and Sunday being the most frequent accident days.

Tesla’s new trip visualization feature in version 1.2 is also a welcomed improvement. Previously, drivers were not given detailed feedback about their drives. Instead, they were just given an adjusted score. Trip visualization will show drivers when their trip started, when Autopilot was engaged/disengaged, the time of the infraction (if any), and when the trip ended.

These insights will hopefully allow drivers to reflect on each drive and correct any aggressive driving in order to receive Full Self-Driving beta.

Although Tesla has launched Safety Score v1.2, some drivers will remain enrolled in the original version. You can see which version you're enrolled in by scrolling to the bottom of the Safety Score screen.

These Safety Score improvements come at the same time Tesla Insurance launches in Minnesota.

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Tesla Smoking While Supercharging? A Look at What's Actually Happening

By Karan Singh
Hot_Engineering3140 on Reddit

Winter is here, and temperatures are dropping, so one of the most common Tesla questions is about to resurface.

If you’ve landed here after frantically searching about “smoke” coming from your Tesla while Supercharging, take a deep breath—it’s completely normal.

Tesla Smoking While Charging

If you’re Supercharging in freezing weather—even with preconditioning—you might notice steam rising from your Tesla. But rest assured, your car isn’t smoking.

Your Tesla’s heat pump is hard at work warming both the cabin and battery to keep you comfortable and ensure optimal charging temperatures. Over time, condensation and ice build-up in the heat exchanger coils.

Why Does It Happen?

When you reach a Supercharger with your vehicle, the heat pump is still running hot, but without the cold air from driving to keep the heat exchanger coils cool, the ice and condensation quickly start to evaporate—creating what looks like smoke.

Since this typically happens near the front of the vehicle, where a car would traditionally have an engine, new vehicle owners can be startled by the discovery. However, rest assured that it’s just water vapor and it’s completely normal in cold weather.

In fact, this behavior can be experienced in any EV with a heat pump in cold climates. So, if you saw steam coming out of your vehicle and panicked, don’t worry—you’re not alone.

Now that you know what’s happening, go ahead and Supercharge with confidence.

Tesla Improves YouTube App With Smoother Playback

By Karan Singh
Not a Tesla App

Tesla made a lot of improvements in the 2024 Holiday Update, including more than 15 undocumented improvements that were included in the release. One of these was a stealthy performance improvement to the YouTube app.

Several people have mentioned they’ve seen improved performance on YouTube since this year’s Holiday Update - and there’s an interesting reason why.

YouTube Improvements

The improved YouTube performance in Tesla vehicles comes from an unexpected source—Tesla actually rolled back support for YouTube’s newer AV1 video encoding. Instead, vehicles now default to the older VP9 encoding standard.

While AV1 is highly efficient in terms of bandwidth, it requires considerably more processing power to decode and display videos. VP9, on the other hand, is less computationally demanding but uses more bandwidth to achieve the same video quality. This trade-off means smoother playback and better overall performance, even if it comes at the cost of slightly higher data usage.

Intel Inside

The VP9 video codec that the YouTube app is now using is much easier to decode, making it less taxing on the vehicle’s processor. This change is particularly beneficial for Tesla vehicles with Intel processors, which previously struggled to stream video at just 720p. When using AV1, these vehicles often experienced stuttering, sometimes forcing the YouTube app to automatically downgrade playback to 480p.

With this update, Intel-based Teslas should now be able to stream at 1080p smoothly. Streaming at 1440p is also possible, although occasional stutters still occur as the system keeps up with the decoding process.

Intel-based vehicles are the big winners with this change, but this appears to affect AMD Ryzen-based infotainment units as well, providing even smoother playback.

Chromium Web App

Tesla’s Theater apps aren’t native applications; instead, they run as chromeless web apps, leveraging the open-source browser built into Teslas known as Chromium (the open-source version of Chrome). Although this works quite well, there is a severe limitation - Chromium hardware acceleration isn’t supported on Linux, the operating system Tesla uses for their OS.

As a result, Tesla vehicles rely on software decoding instead of hardware decoding, which would otherwise handle video playback far more efficiently. A potential solution could be for Tesla to transition away from Chromium-based web apps in favor of a Mozilla Firefox-based browser, as Firefox does support hardware acceleration on Linux. This switch could also open the door to better streaming performance and the possibility of expanding Tesla’s in-car entertainment options.

However, Tesla’s choice of Chromium likely stems from Digital Rights Management (DRM) requirements for streaming services like Disney+ and Netflix, which rely on DRM-enabled playback. Firefox on Linux has had inconsistent support for DRM due to codec availability and variations in operating system versions.

We’re hopeful that Tesla will either adopt Firefox or develop a fully native application to improve video streaming, rather than continuing with the current web-based Tesla Theater. This shift could also pave the way for additional in-car applications built on Tesla’s native Linux environment—perhaps even reviving the long-rumored Tesla App Store.

Regardless, this update is a welcome improvement, particularly for YouTube, which remains one of the most widely used Theater Mode apps due to its accessibility, free content, and mix of short and long-form videos. It remains to be seen whether similar improvements are made for Netflix, Disney+, or other streaming platforms.

If you’ve noticed improved performance in Theater Mode, now you know why.

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