Tesla Autopilot is now enabling the car to perceive the space around it thanks to the development of its Occupancy Networks. Tesla’s Autopilot Software Director, Ashok Elluswamy, shared a detailed thread on Twitter about a recent workshop the Autopilot team held. He also shared the workshop on Twitter.
Presented some of the recent work from the Tesla Autopilot team at CVPR this year, especially about "Occupancy Networks" – our approach to solve general obstacle detection and using it to enable sophisticated collision avoidance. Full talk here: https://t.co/wpGXlNHaWl (1/12)
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) August 21, 2022
In the video and Twitter Thread, Ashok explained how Tesla developed Occupancy Networks to literally give the car a sense of its surroundings. Humans have the ability to understand the objects around them at any given time. Is that car down the road moving at a slow speed or a fast speed? Do I, a pedestrian, have enough time to get across the street before being hit? What is that in the middle of the road? What is that falling from the sky? I should move out the way.
These reactions to scenarios and split-second decisions come naturally to humans. Tesla’s Autopilot Team is working to program the vehicles to do the same thing and this will save lives. Imagine the car being able to correctly detect its surroundings while the driver isn’t even paying attention. An example is sudden unintended accelerations (SUA). Ashok pointed out that Autopilot prevents around 40 of these types of accidents daily.
The workshop was held in June at this year’s Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR.) in New Orleans. Ashok explained that the team developed Occupancy Networks which enable the car to predict the volumetric occupancy of everything around it.
Ashok explained that the typical approaches such as image-space segmentation of free space or pixel-wise depth have many issues. The solution to those issues is Occupancy Networks.
In other words, Occupancy Networks enable the car to perceive the space around it and determine whether or not it can drive in that space. For example, if a UFO were to suddenly crash in front of you while you’re driving, you would react quickly in the safest way possible. This is what the Autopilot Team is training the software to do.
Ashok shared details of how Occupancy Networks used Neural Radience Fields (NeRFs). “The occupancy representation of these networks allows for differentiable rendering of images (based on the Neural Radiance Fields work). However, unlike typical NeRFs, which are per scene, these occupancy nets generalize across scenes.”
These predictions are already used to prevent a lot of collisions. For e.g., Autopilot prevents ~40 crashes / day where human drivers mistakenly press the accelerator at 100% instead of the brakes. In the video Autopilot automatically brakes, saving this person's legs (7/12) pic.twitter.com/XtMssPT9cM
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) August 21, 2022
You can read Ashok’s full Twitter thread here and you can watch his presentation here. We are a little over a month before Tesla’s AI Day and I’m sure Tesla will share more about the life-saving technology it is working on as well as the Optimus Bot.
Dr. Know It All recently published a video about the new 10.69 update and shared his thought about Occupancy Network.
In a message on Twitter, he told me, “The beauty of Occupancy Networks is that the car doesn’t have to know what the objects it sees are, it just has to know that they are there in order to avoid them!”
Note: Johnna is a Tesla shareholder and supports its mission.
Your feedback is important. If you have any comments, concerns, or see a typo, you can email me at johnna@teslarati.com. You can also reach me on Twitter @JohnnaCrider1
Tesla Robotaxi ride-hailing without a Safety Monitor is proving to be a difficult task, according to some riders who made the journey to Austin to attempt to ride in one of its vehicles that has zero supervision.
Last week, Tesla officially removed Safety Monitors from some — not all — of its Robotaxi vehicles in Austin, Texas, answering skeptics who said the vehicles still needed supervision to operate safely and efficiently.
BREAKING: Tesla launches public Robotaxi rides in Austin with no Safety Monitor
Tesla aimed to remove Safety Monitors before the end of 2025, and it did, but only to company employees. It made the move last week to open the rides to the public, just a couple of weeks late to its original goal, but the accomplishment was impressive, nonetheless.
However, the small number of Robotaxis that are operating without Safety Monitors has proven difficult to hail for a ride. David Moss, who has gained notoriety recently as the person who has traveled over 10,000 miles in his Tesla on Full Self-Driving v14 without any interventions, made it to Austin last week.
He has tried to get a ride in a Safety Monitor-less Robotaxi for the better part of four days, and after 38 attempts, he still has yet to grab one:
Wow just wow!
It’s 8:30PM, 29° out ice storm hailing & Tesla Robotaxi service has turned back on!
Waymo is offline & vast majority of humans are home in the storm
Ride 38 was still supervised but by far most impressive yet pic.twitter.com/1aUnJkcYm8
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) January 25, 2026
Tesla said last week that it was rolling out a controlled test of the Safety Monitor-less Robotaxis. Ashok Elluswamy, who heads the AI program at Tesla, confirmed that the company was “starting with a few unsupervised vehicles mixed in with the broader Robotaxi fleet with Safety Monitors,” and that “the ratio will increase over time.”
This is a good strategy that prioritizes safety and keeps the company’s controlled rollout at the forefront of the Robotaxi rollout.
However, it will be interesting to see how quickly the company can scale these completely monitor-less rides. It has proven to be extremely difficult to get one, but that is understandable considering only a handful of the cars in the entire Austin fleet are operating with no supervision within the vehicle.
Tesla has given its biggest hint that Full Self-Driving in Europe is imminent, as a new feature seems to show that the company is preparing for frequent border crossings.
Tesla owner and influencer BLKMDL3, also known as Zack, recently took his Tesla to the border of California and Mexico at Tijuana, and at the international crossing, Full Self-Driving showed an interesting message: “Upcoming country border — FSD (Supervised) will become unavailable.”
FSD now shows a new message when approaching an international border crossing.
Stayed engaged the whole way as we crossed the border and worked great in Mexico! pic.twitter.com/bDzyLnyq0g
— Zack (@BLKMDL3) January 26, 2026
Due to regulatory approvals, once a Tesla operating on Full Self-Driving enters a new country, it is required to comply with the laws and regulations that are applicable to that territory. Even if legal, it seems Tesla will shut off FSD temporarily, confirming it is in a location where operation is approved.
This is something that will be extremely important in Europe, as crossing borders there is like crossing states in the U.S.; it’s pretty frequent compared to life in America, Canada, and Mexico.
Tesla has been working to get FSD approved in Europe for several years, and it has been getting close to being able to offer it to owners on the continent. However, it is still working through a lot of the red tape that is necessary for European regulators to approve use of the system on their continent.
This feature seems to be one that would be extremely useful in Europe, considering the fact that crossing borders into other countries is much more frequent than here in the U.S., and would cater to an area where approvals would differ.
Tesla has been testing FSD in Spain, France, England, and other European countries, and plans to continue expanding this effort. European owners have been fighting for a very long time to utilize the functionality, but the red tape has been the biggest bottleneck in the process.
Tesla Europe builds momentum with expanding FSD demos and regional launches
Tesla operates Full Self-Driving in the United States, China, Canada, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship V3 gets launch date update from Elon Musk
The first flight of Starship Version 3 and its new Raptor V3 engines could happen as early as March.
Elon Musk has announced that SpaceX’s next Starship launch, Flight 12, is expected in about six weeks. This suggests that the first flight of Starship Version 3 and its new Raptor V3 engines could happen as early as March.
In a post on X, Elon Musk stated that the next Starship launch is in six weeks. He accompanied his announcement with a photo that seemed to have been taken when Starship’s upper stage was just about to separate from the Super Heavy Booster. Musk did not state whether SpaceX will attempt to catch the Super Heavy Booster during the upcoming flight.
The upcoming flight will mark the debut of Starship V3. The upgraded design includes the new Raptor V3 engine, which is expected to have nearly twice the thrust of the original Raptor 1, at a fraction of the cost and with significantly reduced weight. The Starship V3 platform is also expected to be optimized for manufacturability.
The Starship V3 Flight 12 launch timeline comes as SpaceX pursues an aggressive development cadence for the fully reusable launch system. Previous iterations of Starship have racked up a mixed but notable string of test flights, including multiple integrated flight tests in 2025.
Interestingly enough, SpaceX has teased an aggressive timeframe for Starship V3’s first flight. Way back in late November, SpaceX noted on X that it will be aiming to launch Starship V3’s maiden flight in the first quarter of 2026. This was despite setbacks like a structural anomaly on the first V3 booster during ground testing.
“Starship’s twelfth flight test remains targeted for the first quarter of 2026,” the company wrote in its post on X.
Tesla Robotaxi ride-hailing without a Safety Monitor proves to be difficult
Tesla gives its biggest hint that Full Self-Driving in Europe is imminent
