Let’s take a peek at the new update and all the new features.
Navigation Improvements
One of the new features is the ability to choose how your vehicle chooses a route. If you have “online routing” enabled, then your vehicle’s routing is determined remotely, which lets it take more things into account. However, we now have alternate routes; the driver has limited control over how the route is chosen.
This update introduces new options on how the route is determined, giving the user more control.
Fastest Time - This option appears to be the current default, likely similar to how the vehicle picks a route today.
Least Congestion - This option appears to select routes that have minimal traffic congestion, thereby making your drive that much easier and safer - even if it's a longer route. It's a good use of Tesla’s integration with live traffic data.
Lowest Tolls - This is an interesting option. It doesn’t avoid tolls like the pre-existing option but finds the route that’s the fastest and has the lowest tolls. That’ll be an interesting option for people where toll routes have a big impact on travel times.
While it doesn’t appear that this brings the long-awaited avoid highways feature, it does give users a lot more control over the route the vehicle takes. While Teslas in China use Baidu maps with exciting features, these changes are to Tesla’s backend, so we expect these features to arrive in other regions as well.
Service Area Functions
As part of navigation improvements, approaching a highway service area in China will now automatically open an on-screen prompt, directing you to restaurants, convenience stores, and charging facilities within the service area. It’ll even point out big-name restaurants.
We’d love to see something similar to this in Europe and North America, especially as you pull up to a Supercharger at a rest area.
For those who prefer a little less in-your-face advertising of local businesses, this option can be disabled in Vehicle Options > Navigation > Service Areas.
It’s not clear whether this option will be available outside of China in the future.
The Service Area pop-up from Tesla China.
Not a Tesla App
Other Features
This is the big holiday update for China to celebrate the Chinese New Year. While the update includes some additional new features that we haven’t seen, the rest of it looks to be China-exclusive games, apps and other holiday update features we’ve already received.
The three exclusive games are from Tencent - Happy Landlord, Happy Mahjong, and Throw Eggs, and will be region-restricted to Chinese vehicles.
This update also adds Actually Smart Summon for vehicles equipped with EAP or FSD.
The final one is a bit interesting - Supercharger Bollards. Certain Superchargers in China have ground posts or bollards that automatically raise or lower. These locks prevent non-charging vehicles from parking in the Supercharger spots. Unfortunately for users, it meant you had to open the Tesla app to lower a specific bollard before being able to park to charge your vehicle. However, with this update you can now unlock the bollard from inside the vehicle - the button to unlock the bollard will pop up automatically as you’re navigating to the Supercharger.
We’re hoping the Service Area functions and Navigation improvements make their way to other markets in some capacity, so keep your fingers crossed for a North American or European version of this update soon.
Subscribe
Subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest Tesla news, upcoming features and software updates.
With Tesla’s first major expansion of the Robotaxi Geofence now complete and operational, they’ve been hard at work with validation in new locations - and some are quite the drive from the current Austin Geofence.
Validation fleet vehicles have been spotted operating in a wider perimeter around the city, from rural roads in the west end to the more complex area closer to the airport. Tesla mentioned during their earnings call that the Robotaxi has already completed 7,000 miles in Austin, and it will expand its area of operation to roughly 10 times what it is now. This lines up with the validation vehicles we’ve been tracking around Austin.
Based on the spread of the new sightings, the potential next geofence could cover a staggering 450 square miles - a tenfold increase from the current service area of roughly 42 square miles. You can check this out in our map below with the sightings we’re tracking.
If Tesla decides to expand into these new areas, it would represent a tenfold increase over their current geofence, matching Tesla’s statement. The new area would cover approximately 10% of the 4,500-square-mile Austin metropolitan area. If Tesla can offer Robotaxi services in that entire area, it would prove they can tackle just about any city in the United States.
From Urban Core to Rural Roads
The locations of the validation vehicles show a clear intent to move beyond the initial urban and suburban core and prepare the Robotaxi service for a much wider range of uses.
In the west, validation fleet vehicles have been spotted as far as Marble Falls - a much more rural environment that features different road types, higher speed limits, and potentially different challenges.
In the south, Tesla has been expanding towards Kyle, which is part of the growing Austin-San Antonio suburban corridor spanning Highway 35. San Antonio is only 80 miles (roughly a 90-minute drive) away, and could easily become part of the existing Robotaxi area if Tesla obtains regulatory approval there.
In the East, we haven’t spotted any new validation vehicles. This is likely because Tesla’s validation vehicles originate from Giga Texas, which is located East of Austin. We won’t really know if Tesla is expanding in this direction until they start pushing past Giga Texas and toward Houston.
Finally, there have been some validation vehicles spotted just North of the new expanded boundaries, meaning that Tesla isn’t done in that direction either. This direction consists of the largest suburban areas of Austin, which have so far not been serviced by any form of autonomous vehicle.
Rapid Scaling
This new, widespread validation effort confirms what we already know. Tesla is pushing for an intensive period of public data gathering and system testing in a new area, right before conducting geofence expansions. The sheer scale of this new validation zone tells us that Tesla isn’t taking this slowly - the next step is going to be a great leap instead, and they essentially confirmed this during this Q&A session on the recent call. The goal is clearly to bring the entire Austin Metropolitan area into the Robotaxi Network.
While the previous expansion showed off just how Tesla can scale the network, this new phase of validation testing is a demonstration of just how fast they can validate and expand their network. The move to validate across rural, suburban, and urban areas simultaneously shows their confidence in these new Robotaxi FSD builds.
Eventually, all these improvements from Robotaxi will make their way to customer FSD builds sometime in Q3 2025, so there is a lot to look forward to.
For years, the progress of Tesla’s FSD has been measured by smoother turns, better lane centering, and more confident unprotected left turns. But as the system matures, a new, more subtle form of intelligence is emerging - one that shifts its attention to the human nuances of navigating roads. A new video posted to X shows the most recent FSD build, V13.2.9, demonstrating this in a remarkable real-world scenario.
Toll Booth Magic
In the video, a Model Y running FSD pulls up to a toll booth and smoothly comes to a stop, allowing the driver to handle payment. The car waits patiently as the driver interacts with the attendant. Then, at the precise moment the toll booth operator finishes the transaction and says “Have a great day”, the vehicle starts moving, proceeding through the booth - all without any input from the driver.
If you notice, there’s no gate here at this toll booth. This interaction all happened naturally with FSD.
While the timing was perfect, the FSD wasn’t listening to the conversation for clues (maybe one day, with Grok?) The reality, as explained by Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI, is even more impressive.
It can see the transaction happening using the repeater & pillar cameras. Hence FSD proceeds on its own when the transaction is complete 😎
FSD is simply using the cameras on the side of the vehicle to watch the exchange between the driver and attendant. The neural network has been trained on enough data that it can visually recognize the conclusion of a transaction - the exchange of money or a card and the hands pulling away - and understands that this is the trigger to proceed.
The Bigger Picture
This capability is far more significant than just a simple party trick. FSD is gaining the ability to perceive and navigate a world built for humans in the most human-like fashion possible.
If FSD can learn what a completed toll transaction looks like, it’s an example of the countless other complex scenarios it’ll be able to handle in the future. This same visual understanding could be applied to navigating a fast-food drive-thru, interacting with a parking garage attendant, passing through a security checkpoint, or boarding a ferry or vehicle train — all things we thought that would come much later.
These human-focused interactions will eventually become even more useful, as FSD becomes ever more confident in responding to humans on the road, like when a police officer tells a vehicle to go a certain direction, or a construction worker flags you through a site. These are real-world events that happen every day, and it isn’t surprising to see FSD picking up on the subtleties and nuances of human interaction.
This isn’t a pre-programmed feature for a specific toll booth. It is an emergent capability of the end-to-end AI neural nets. By learning from millions of videos across billions of miles, FSD is beginning to build a true contextual understanding of the world. The best part - with a 10x context increase on its way, this understanding will grow rapidly and become far more powerful.
These small, subtle moments of intelligence are the necessary steps to a truly robust autonomous system that can handle the messy, unpredictable nature of human society.
_300w.png)
