Connect with us

News

Tesla CEO Elon Musk to join volunteers in end-of-year deliveries at Fremont

Tesla showroom in Century City mall, Los Angeles (Credit: Teslarati)

Published

on

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is committed to ensuring the electric car maker meets its guidance of delivering 360,000 to 400,000 vehicles this year – so much that he’ll be assisting on vehicle deliveries on New Year’s Eve at the Fremont factory delivery hub.

Coming from a busy weekend in Boca Chica, Texas with the SpaceX team working on the Starship tank dome, the Tesla chief will brave the 2,000-mile journey back to the Tesla Delivery Center in Fremont to make sure he is one with the staff and community of owner-volunteers in making the last big push in the final day of the year.

“Headed to Tesla Fremont factory tomorrow to help with vehicle deliveries,” noted Musk over Twitter.

This won’t be the first time Elon Musk hand delivers a vehicle to a customer. Last June, Musk surprised a new Model 3 owner when he personally delivered a vehicle to their residence in a test of a new factory-direct system.

Advertisement

Elon Musk delivers Tesla Model 3 to owner’s home in test of factory-direct system

In September last year, the same remarkable thing happened when the community mobilized itself to help Elon Musk and Tesla get out of the so-called “delivery logistics hell.” The idea of volunteerism within the community was first pitched by Ride the Lightning podcast host Ryan McCaffrey and immediately greenlighted by Musk saying any help would be greatly appreciated.

During such a delivery push, Tesla volunteers help out new electric vehicle owners know the ins and outs of their vehicles from how to navigate the Tesla touchscreen, different settings that they should know, and even how to get their phones connected to the car.

This sense of volunteerism is also not just in the United States. Last June, Tesla owner-volunteers in China banded together to help with end-of-Q2 deliveries.

Tesla owners getting involved in welcoming new EV owners during delivery blitzes, whether to end a quarter or a year, just proves the loyalty of the community and its oneness with the company’s mission of the brand to a more sustainable future.

It won’t be long before we begin to see this sense of community in the Chinese market as Tesla begins mass production of its China-made Model 3, followed by Germany where the company is currently locking up land for its European-based Gigafactory.

Advertisement

Did you capture a photo of Elon at the delivery center? Share it with us at tips@teslarati.com or DM via Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook!

A curious soul who keeps wondering how Elon Musk, Tesla, electric cars, and clean energy technologies will shape the future, or do we really need to escape to Mars.

Advertisement
Comments

News

Tesla reveals huge Cybercab detail in new guide for First Responders

Published

on

Credit: Tesla

Tesla revealed a major new Cybercab detail in a guide it released for First Responders, showing new territory in its beliefs and intentions for the ride-hailing-focused vehicle that entered production in April.

The First Responders Guide is released to give fire departments, paramedics, and other emergency personnel the proper guidance on what to do in the event of an accident, entrapment, or other situation that would require immediate attention.

On one of the pages of the First Responders Guide, Tesla revealed a stark detail about the Cybercab, which could help personnel enter the vehicle more easily in case of an emergency.

Tesla Cybercab has one important piece that AI4 cars might need for FSD

Advertisement

It shows Tesla has no intention of releasing any Cybercab units that were initially proposed for ride-hailing services for the general public with any manual controls, meaning a steering wheel or pedals:

“A Cybercab equipped with steering wheel, brake pedal, and an acceleration pedal is typically an engineering or test vehicle, and operates at SAE Level 2 autonomy. Cybercab is not typically equipped with a steering wheel or acceleration and brake pedals.”

This is a major development for those who continue to believe Tesla planned to release the Cybercab with any sort of manual controls so that passengers could take over if needed. However, when Tesla started manufacturing production versions of the Cybercab in Giga Texas earlier this year, they were spotted without a steering wheel or pedals.

It essentially confirms the company has no intentions of bringing manual controls to the car’s production versions. Some have argued that the likelihood of Tesla having something

There still are some Cybercab units out there with a steering wheel and pedals, and as Tesla said, these cars are engineering or test vehicles, which have Safety Monitors on board to help the car out of a precarious situation or emergency.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

News

Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ Release Notes: new capabilities and features

Published

on

(Credit: Megan Gale/Twitter)

Tesla released the Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ suite to owners of Hardware 3 or AI3 vehicles today, adding several new features to the vehicles that were once believed to be capable of unsupervised self-driving.

Now, Tesla has released this modified suite to older Tesla vehicles, adding plenty of new features and capabilities.

Here are the full release notes for the suite:

  • Distilled the intelligence from HW4 V14 into HW3. This allows HW3 to directly learn how to handle scenarios using HW4 V14 as a guide. This process unlocks the improvements that have been made to HW4 including Reinforcement Learning (RL) and offline models for HW3.
  • Improved both proactive and reactive responsiveness across a wide variety of categories including navigation handling, merges and forks, pedestrian interactions, traffic lights, and vehicle cut-in scenarios.
  • Improved general comfort in nominal scenarios through fewer false slowdowns, smoother steering and more consistent lane centering.
  • Introduced parking, unparking, and reversing capabilities.
  • Added Arrival Options for you to select where FSD should park: in a Parking Lot, on the Street, in a Driveway, or at the Curbside.
  • Speed Profiles are now available at all times, to further customize driving style preference.

These improvements, according to Tesla’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, help distill the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute configurations of AI3.

Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ for older cars finally gets released

Advertisement

He added:

“It includes destination options and speed profiles on city roads, but more importantly significantly improved safety. We hope you’ll enjoy it, once the build ships wide.”

Tesla will continue to roll out the v14 Lite suite more widely in the coming weeks, the company said.

Continue Reading

News

Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ for older cars finally gets released

Published

on

tesla model 3 model y
Credit: Tesla Inc.

Tesla has finally released its Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ suite for older cars that equip the Hardware 3 or AI 3 chip, which have not been able to handle the newest versions of the company’s driver assistance software.

Tesla officially started releasing the v14 Lite suite to owners in the Early Access Program last night. The company’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, said that the rollout will continue over the next few weeks. The build distills the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute configurations of an AI3 car.

It also includes a variety of new features that were available to AI4 cars running v14, including:

  • Start Self-Driving from Park
  • Arrival and Parking Options
  • Speed Profiles

The release is highly anticipated because those owners with AI3 vehicles were early adopters into the FSD platform and were promised that their cars would be capable of achieving Full Self-Driving.

However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted during the company’s recent Q1 Earnings Call that these vehicles would not be capable of achieving unsupervised Full Self-Driving, which is what Tesla had originally said.

Owners were not pleased with this answer, or the idea that their commitment to buying the suite outright for thousands of dollars would not yield the ability to drive without operating the car. Tesla gave some solutions for this, including a discount on a new car, or an upgrade to an AI4 or AI5 self-driving computer and new, upgraded cameras.

Advertisement

Tesla owners do not seem pleased with these options, as they require giving the company more money.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that Tesla came through for owners here by releasing v14 Lite before the end of Q2, something it had promised owners during the previous Earnings Call. Tesla has had trouble keeping up with timelines, but this is a big achievement for the team.

Continue Reading