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 (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a massive beat on vehicle deliveries for the second quarter, delivering 489,126 vehicles and building 451,758 cars during the three-month span.
This was a major shock for those on Wall Street as they anticipated somewhere around 400,000 deliveries for the quarter, and showed Tesla still has plenty of demand for its vehicles around the world and in the U.S. despite losing the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year.
Tesla Q2 2026 Earnings Results
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.33 reported vs. $0.53 expected
- Revenues – $28.236 billion reported vs. $26.4 billion expected
- Free Cash Flow- -$1.092B
- Profit -$ 4.751B
Tesla (beat/missed) analyst expectations, so the market response to the company’s quarter is what we will look for next.
Tesla shares closed today down just over 1 percent, trading at $374.01.
In the past, it has been anyone’s guess with what Tesla shares will do after they report earnings. Strong quarters have resulted in sharp drops, while lackluster quarters have seen the stock shoot up considerably.
Tesla will hold its Q2 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q2 2026 Earnings Call https://t.co/zZS6ii2TWK
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
Tesla is about to make parking in busy parking lots at businesses and other points of interest less stressful than ever by allowing drivers more control over where they park and how, CEO Elon Musk confirmed on X.
Tesla has been working to improve the parking performance of vehicles utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite, but now it is looking to add more customization, allowing drivers to choose the specific space they park in, but also potentially the orientation the car pulls into the spot:
It’s coming soon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2026
Musk has reiterated on X twice over the past several weeks that Tesla is working to make things with the FSD suite based more on the driver’s specific preferences and behaviors that were seen in past drives.
Essentially, it sounds like if you tend to park away from a business to avoid other vehicles, Tesla FSD will soon recognize that preference of yours and start parking further away as well. Additionally, the prospect of assigned parking spaces has been something many owners have voiced concerns about.
Living in a community with assigned parking spaces makes using FSD incredibly difficult as it will rarely park in the correct spot when there are so many to choose from. This is also pertinent in work settings where there are sometimes assigned parking spaces.
The updates to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite in terms of listening to driver preferences with parking are also extending to routing. Tesla announced yesterday that with the release of its 2026 Summer Update, it was adding Automatic Navigation and Preferred Routes:
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
Tesla has always maintained the idea that any human input is bad input, and that, ideally, Tesla Full Self-Driving will always make the right decision. Of course, this is all in theory, but the issue is that so many of Tesla’s interventions have come because it does something that is not necessarily wrong, but perhaps not what the driver would prefer.
Taking these preferences into account will help Tesla alleviate some of the potentially unnecessary interventions that drivers perform.
Tesla is starting to prepare for the launch of the Optimus robot in its smartphone app, new coding strings show. Elon Musk has referred to Optimus as what will be the greatest-selling product of any kind of all time, and now, Tesla is getting ready for its launch.
Tesla’s smartphone app had several first-time mentions of the Optimus program, according to Tesla App Updates, who intially reported on the appearance. Here’s what they found:
A Dedicated “Robot” Phone Key Authentication
Tesla is working on a Bluetooth Low Energy, or BLE, authentication that is specifically for robots. This does not only apply to Optimus, though, as Robotaxi, which is Tesla’s autonomous ride-hailing platform, might also identify vehicles within the fleet as robots as well.
Tesla shows rapid teardown of Model S and X lines, paving the way for Optimus at Fremont
Essentially, pairing your phone as a key to anything Tesla identifies as a robot to a “whitelist” of authorized devices. Optimus, Robotaxi, or other products that fall into this category will only respond if the device trying to communicate with it is authorized.
This is a great security feature that will eliminate at least face-value and low-level threats.
Home Data Collection and System Alerts
This appears to be somewhat of a neural network for Optimus within your house. There will be a dedicated screen that asks for consent to collect both video and spatial data while Optimus performs in-home tasks. Everything from vacuuming, washing dishes, dusting, and other activities will be tracked.
There will also be a comprehensive alert system that will track everything from low battery to mechanical issues.
Other Changes
Most of the changes tracked in this particular app update are related to Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update, and include things such as image assets for new features, a preview of the new custom wraps feature, and other unique features.
You can check out our coverage on what is included with the 2026 Summer Update here:
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla is about to make parking in busy lots less stressful than ever
