Firmware
Tesla’s Navigate on Autopilot takes on heavy traffic and rainy roads in nighttime test
Tesla’s Navigate on Autopilot is arguably the most notable update that the company’s driver-assist feature has received in recent months. Available as part of the Software Version 9 update, the feature allows drivers to get to their destination more efficiently by guiding their car on and off the highway,” and by intelligently suggesting lane changes to keep vehicles on their route. Navigate on Autopilot also enables cars to make speed adjustments to prevent instances where a driver gets stuck behind slow vehicles.
Since its initial release late last year, Navigate on Autopilot has become more accurate and smooth in its operation. This could be seen in a recent test conducted by the Our Tesla Life YouTube channel, which opted to test Navigate on Autopilot’s capabilities during a trip from Newport Beach to Westminster, CA. What was particularly notable about this test, though, was that it was conducted during a rainy night, and at a time when there were a lot of vehicles on the road.
As could be seen on the results of the Model X owner’s test, Navigate on Autopilot works quite smoothly. There were still some instances when the driver-assist system disengaged, though, as well as times when merging maneuvers could have been done better. Nevertheless, Navigate on Autopilot was impressive, though still evidently a hands-on system.
The release version of Navigate on Autopilot is actually a tempered down iteration of the system that was initially rolled out to members of Tesla’s early access program in September last year. The early access version of the feature enabled vehicles to conduct on-ramp to off-ramp maneuvers, as well as initiate intelligent lane changes. When Navigate on Autopilot was fully released to the United States and Canada, though, Tesla opted to regulate the feature a bit more, requiring drivers to confirm suggested lane changes before a maneuver is done.
In its blog post about Navigate on Autopilot, Tesla noted that future versions of the system would allow more automated features to be introduced. “While initially, the feature will require drivers to confirm lane changes using the turn stalk before the car moves into an adjacent lane, future versions of Navigate on Autopilot will allow customers to waive the confirmation requirement if they choose to,” Tesla noted.
Navigate on Autopilot stands as a notable update to Tesla’s driver-assist system — one that could very well prove to be a building block for some of the company’s upcoming Full Self-Driving features. Highway on-ramp to off-ramp maneuvers, as well as overtaking capabilities, after all, are most certainly among the basic features expected for FSD. In this light, it appears safe to assume that Tesla’s Navigate on Autopilot would likely see a notable improvement as soon as the electric car maker starts the rolling out its Hardware 3 to its vehicles.
The key to Tesla’s seemingly elusive Full Self-Driving features could very well be the hardware that the company is designing in-house. Tesla’s executives such as Elon Musk and Tesla’s Director of Artificial Intelligence Andrej Karpathy have both expressed their excitement for the upcoming hardware update. Karpathy, for one, noted during a previous earnings call that the new hardware would allow Tesla to deploy large, well-trained neural networks that would further improve the capabilities of functions like Navigate on Autopilot.
“It is a common finding in the industry, and that we see this as well, is that as you make networks bigger by adding more neurons, the accuracy of all their predictions increases with the added capacity. So in other words, we are currently at a place where we’ve trained large neural networks that work very well, but we are not able to deploy them to the fleet due to computational constraints,” Karpathy said.
Watch Our Tesla Life‘s Navigate on Autopilot test in the video below.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
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— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Tesla announced its Spring 2026 software update, and it’s the most feature-dense seasonal release the company has put out. The update covers twelve named changes spanning FSD, voice AI, safety lighting, dashcam storage, and pet display customization, among other things.
The centerpiece for owners with AI4 hardware is a redesigned Self-Driving app. The new interface lets owners subscribe to Full Self-Driving with a single tap and view ongoing FSD usage stats directly in the vehicle.
Grok gets its biggest in-car upgrade yet. The update adds a “Hey Grok” hands-free wake word along with location-based reminders, so a driver can now say “remind me to pick up groceries when I get home” without touching the screen. Grok first arrived in vehicles in July 2025, but each update has pushed it closer to genuine daily utility. Musk framed the broader vision clearly at Davos in January, saying Tesla is “really moving into a future that is based on autonomy.”
On safety, the update introduces enhanced blind spot warning lights that integrate directly with the cabin’s ambient lighting, building on the blind spot door warning that arrived in update 2026.8.
Dog Mode has been renamed Pet Mode and now lets owners choose a dog, cat, or hedgehog icon and add their pet’s name to the display.
Dashcam retention now extends up to 24 hours, up from the previous one-hour rolling loop, with a permanent save option for any clip. Weather maps now show rain and snow with better color differentiation and include the past hour of precipitation data along the route.
Tesla has now established a clear rhythm of two major OTA pushes per year. As with last year’s Spring update, that cycle started taking shape in 2025 with adaptive headlights and trunk customization. The 2025 Holiday Update then added Grok to the vehicle for the first time. This Spring follows that structure: the Holiday update introduces new architecture, and the Spring update broadens it across the fleet.
Two notable features still did not make it. IFTTT automations, which launched in China earlier this year, were held back from this North American release for unknown reasons, and Apple CarPlay remains absent, reportedly still delayed by iOS 26 and Apple Maps compatibility issues.
Below is the full list of feature updates released by Tesla.
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 13, 2026
It appears that Tesla may be preparing to roll out some subscription-based services soon. Based on the observations of a Wales-based Model 3 owner who performed some reverse-engineering on the Tesla mobile app, it seems that the electric car maker has added a new “Subscribe” option beside the “Buy” option within the “Upgrades” tab, at least behind the scenes.
A screenshot of the new option was posted in the r/TeslaMotors subreddit, and while the Tesla owner in question, u/Callump01, admitted that the screenshot looks like something that could be easily fabricated, he did submit proof of his reverse-engineering to the community’s moderators. The moderators of the r/TeslaMotors subreddit confirmed the legitimacy of the Model 3 owner’s work, further suggesting that subscription options may indeed be coming to Tesla owners soon.
Did some reverse engineering on the app and Tesla looks to be preparing for subscriptions? from r/teslamotors
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite has been heavily speculated to be offered as a subscription option, similar to the company’s Premium Connectivity feature. And back in April, noted Tesla hacker @greentheonly stated that the company’s vehicles already had the source codes for a pay-as-you-go subscription model. The Tesla hacker suggested then that Tesla would likely release such a feature by the end of the year — something that Elon Musk also suggested in the first-quarter earnings call. “I think we will offer Full Self-Driving as a subscription service, but it will be probably towards the end of this year,” Musk stated.
While the signs for an upcoming FSD subscription option seem to be getting more and more prominent as the year approaches its final quarter, the details for such a feature are still quite slim. Pricing for FSD subscriptions, for example, have not been teased by Elon Musk yet, though he has stated on Twitter that purchasing the suite upfront would be more worth it in the long term. References to the feature in the vehicles’ source code, and now in the Tesla mobile app, also listed no references to pricing.
The idea of FSD subscriptions could prove quite popular among electric car owners, especially since it would allow budget-conscious customers to make the most out of the company’s driver-assist and self-driving systems without committing to the features’ full price. The current price of the Full Self-Driving suite is no joke, after all, being listed at $8,000 on top of a vehicle’s cost. By offering subscriptions to features like Navigate on Autopilot with automatic lane changes, owners could gain access to advanced functions only as they are needed.
Elon Musk, for his part, has explained that ultimately, he still believes that purchasing the Full Self-Driving suite outright provides the most value to customers, as it is an investment that would pay off in the future. “I should say, it will still make sense to buy FSD as an option as in our view, buying FSD is an investment in the future. And we are confident that it is an investment that will pay off to the consumer – to the benefit of the consumer.” Musk said.
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