Every Tesla shows some form of visualizations on the screen that help the driver understand what the car is mapping. The car will map major elements such as lane markings, cones and other vehicles. If your car is equipped with FSD HW 3.0 then you’ll see even more objects mapped such as trash cans, arrows on the road, traffic lights and quite a bit more.
The FSD beta for city streets includes many more car visualizations since the car needs to understand so much more about the real world to help it traverse city streets. However the visualizations are not what we are normally used to. They’re Matrix-like outlines that display stationary and moving obstacles on the screen in different colors to help the driver understand what the car is able to understand. It's important to understand that the on screen visualizations are simplified and what the car is actual "seeing" is actually an object and assigning probabilities to what it may be. The visualizations likely display the object that has the highest probablity at the time. The visualizations are there more for debug purposes and troubleshooting than anything else.
We knew that this type of visualization would not be in the final product of the FSD beta. Elon has now mentioned that there is a new FSD rendering approach coming that will better represent what the neural networks see. This could mean brand new renderings to the on screen visualizations and bring us closer to what the final product will be.
If you take Elon’s tweet along with some recently shown off video from a former Tesla UI designer, you can get a feel for what the new visualizations will look like.
The look and feel of the new visualizations are very similar to what non-FSD beta users see today, but they now display a lot more elements in greater detail. The environment visualizations still have that sketch-book-like effect, which helps communicate that the renders are interpretations of the real world and are not to be taken as exact renditions.
The video, which can be seen below, shows off intersections for the first time in addition to crosswalks and traffic light poles. The video goes on to show slightly different car animations when you open your hood or trunk, but these animations do not likely represent what is to come, but instead depict what this designer had envisioned at the time. From the menu at the bottom of the screen you can tell this is not from Tesla’s v11 update.
We now have even more of a reason to look forward to that ‘Download FSD beta’ button as there’s a good likelihood that these new visualizations will be included in that release as well.
Tesla will also be releasing a FSD subscription in May 2021.
Update: Tesla released 'Mind of Car' visualizations in FSD update 9.0. Check out our list of all the visualizations included in the latest FSD betas.
New FSD rendering approach coming that better represents NN probability vector space
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 20, 2021
