Elon Confirms Tesla Will Add Birds-Eye View in Vector-Space

By Nuno Cristovao
Elon Musk says Tesla will add a vector-space birds-eye view in future update
Elon Musk says Tesla will add a vector-space birds-eye view in future update
Not a Tesla App

A helpful feature luxury and even more affordable cars have had for a few years now is “birds-eye view” parking. When the feature is in use, it displays the car on-screen from an overhead perspective in its surroundings, giving you the ability the easily see how close you are to other cars or the curb when parking.

It’s really a somewhat magical feature and a great feature to show off to family and friends. Although Teslas are littered with cameras on all sides, they unfortunately aren’t all facing the right way in order to pull off a feature like this. There are some crucial areas that are missed such as the lower front.

Another reason Tesla hasn’t tried to implement such a feature is that it’s currently under a patent and they would have to license the technology in order to implement it in a similar way. Although it looks like Tesla has figured out a compromise to give customers a very similar feature.

We should have seen this one coming. If you have a Tesla with FSD hardware version 3.0, then you have slowly been seeing Tesla rendering more and more items on the screen. They will now render stop signs, speed limit signs and other traffic control signs, trash cans, cones, traffic lights, different types of vehicles, line markings and quite a bit more. It’s only a matter of time before what Tesla is rendering on the screen becomes a close approximation to the real world. In fact, their whole goal of FSD relies on them achieving this.

Well according to this Elon tweet, this is exactly how Tesla plans to achieve Birds-Eye View without infringing on any patents. When the driver shifts the car into reverse, the car visualization will essentially rotate to have a top-down view, much like we see when setting the car into park. This isn’t exactly what Birds-Eye View does in other vehicles, as those provide real-time camera feeds to show the car’s surroundings, but it will be a vector-space 3D model of Birds-Eye View if you will, which will hopefully be just as helpful.

Elon has also said that this feature will be tied to FSD since it will only be available due to the work that has gone into FSD. However I would not be surprised if Tesla changes their stance on this as many may consider Birds-Eye View a safety feature which Tesla has always included in every car.

Tesla Reveals Robotaxi App and Names the Robotaxi the CyberCab

By Cláudio Afonso

Tesla has invested billions of dollars over the years toward vehicle autonomy. The mission continues as Elon Musk and Tesla now prepare to unveil their ride-hailing product, Robotaxi this August. Or, as Musk called it on Tuesday, Tesla CyberCab.

Early Days

Five years ago, during Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day in April 2019, Elon Musk said he felt “very confident predicting autonomous robotaxis for Tesla in the following year [2020]”. At the time, Musk added a bolder claim, predicting that Tesla wouldn’t even make cars with steering wheels or pedals by 2022. While timeliness may not be Musk’s strong suit, he has a track record for getting things done that others were unwilling to try or thought were impossible. Musk later admitted he can be overly optimistic and said “sometimes I am not on time, but I get it done.” 

Now, 5 years later, we have the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August 8th. After the release of FSD v12, it’s clear that we’re much closer to autonomy than we were in 2019, although FSD v12 is still a far cry from full autonomy.

While Tesla still has the robotaxi unveiling scheduled for August, Tesla announced yesterday that it’d be prioritizing a simpler “next-gen” model that could be released by early 2025.

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On the conference call, Musk added that Tesla now has over 300 million miles driven with FSD v12 since it was launched just last month. He added that it's becoming “very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy”.

Tesla said it has been investing in the hardware and software ecosystems necessary to achieve vehicle autonomy and a ride-hailing service. The company is confident that it can establish a scalable and profitable autonomous driving business by employing a vision-only architecture.

think of it [Tesla] as combination of Airbnb and Uber meaning that there will be some number of cars that Tesla owns itself and operates

Tesla = Uber + AirBnb

Later on, Elon Musk unveiled that the new service will operate and result in a mix between Uber and Airbnb where the Tesla driver decides if and when he wants his Tesla to be used and by whom. Tesla stated:

“We believe the Tesla software experience is best-in-class across all our products, and plan to seamlessly layer ride-hailing into the Tesla App.”

Tesla’s CEO clarified that the owners will be able to add or remove their car from the fleet “whenever they want” adding that it will be up to them to decide if they want to only let the car be used “by friends and family or only by five-star users or by anyone at any time”. The flexible program will, just like Airbnb, allow the owners to take the car out of the market when they want.

The upcoming ride-hailing service will enable users to easily request a Tesla vehicle, control the car's temperature, monitor its real-time location, and adjust the audio system. The only question is when.

Musk Teases New Model for Early 2025 That Will Use a Mix of Next-Gen and Current Platforms

By Cláudio Afonso

“We have updated our future vehicle line-up to accelerate the launch of new models ahead of our previously communicated start of production in the second half of 2025”. This was one of the key sentences that were part of Tesla’s deck shared on Tuesday directly before its financial results.

Since Reuters’ report a few weeks ago saying Tesla had “scrapped” the highly expected cheaper model— which Elon quickly denied on X —retail and institutional shareholders started asking for more details on Tesla’s product roadmap for 2024 and beyond.

In the earnings conference call, Elon Musk reiterated that Tesla expects to launch the next model in “early 2025, if not late this year”.

“We've updated our future vehicle lineup to accelerate the launch of new models ahead of previously mentioned start of production in the second half of 2025. So, we expect it to be more like the early 2025, if not late this year. “

Over concerns of temporary production halts to update the factories for these new models, Musk said that Tesla will produce new models with certain aspects from their next-generation platform and current models. This will reduce the number of changes needed on production lines and allow Tesla not only to ramp up production faster but also to get the vehicles to market quicker.

Model Y Redesign

Tesla appears to hit that their next-gen vehicle will be less “next-gen” than they were initially aiming for, but to get a new vehicle out the door by late 2024, the process would already have to be in motion. Tesla may likely be referring to the redesigned Model Y, which is expected to reuse many parts from the new Model 3. Earlier this year, Tesla said that the redesigned Model Y will not be released this year, so it makes sense that they’re looking to speed up that production.

Tesla CEO concluded by saying that these measures will allow Tesla to reach a capacity of over 3 million units. Tesla produced 1.84 million vehicles in 2023. However, this year they’re ramping up Cybertruck production and introduced the new Model 3 into new markets.

And we think this should allow us to get to over 3 million vehicles of capacity when realized to the full extent.

Tesla reported on Tuesday its earnings results followed by a conference call where it teased its upcoming Robotaxi and its next-generation platform saying its “purpose-built Robotaxi product will continue to pursue a revolutionary ‘unboxed’ manufacturing strategy”.

Earlier in the day, Tesla announced the new Performance variant of its sedan Model 3 with deliveries in the United States starting already next month. The new version starts at $45,490 (after applying the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit) and goes from 0 to 60mph in 2.9 seconds.

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