Tesla has confirmed that its upcoming wireless charging intended for the Robotaxi is “well above 90%” efficient. While wireless charging for smartphones tends to be about 70-75% efficient in general, a lot of the inefficiency comes from heat and alignment issues.
Tesla appears to have tackled both of these key problems to make wireless charging efficient enough for electric vehicles. Let’s take a look at how, but before we do that, let’s take a look at SAE J2954, the wireless EV charging standard from nearly half a decade ago.
SAE J2954
SAE’s wireless charging standard was created in October 2020. Engineers from SAE and car manufacturers collaborated to build a standard that would work across all EVs. In the end, they figured out a grid-to-battery efficiency of up to 94%. The NACS connector itself is only slightly more efficient—98.55% or so, depending on the temperature of the connector, the cable, the battery pack, and the transformer. That sets a benchmark for what Tesla aims to meet with its wireless charging standard.
What were their key challenges for efficiency? Heat and alignment.
Autopark for Wireless Chargers
Tesla’s Autopark will receive special support for its wireless chargers. Autopark will automatically locate the wireless charging pad and park the vehicle in the best spot for the charging session to begin. As long as the vehicle can accurately place itself over the wireless charger, this solves one of the key issues with wireless charging. It’s not clear whether Tesla is building in any other technology to help the charger find its optimal position. In theory, magnets, like the newer Qi2 standard or Apple’s MagSafe, can help the charger lock in millimeter-perfect positioning.
Having the vehicle locate and park itself over the charger will be far easier than humans trying to accomplish the same feat without software assistance.
Heat Management
A major problem with cell phones and wireless charging is that most do not have active heat dissipation. Instead, they dissipate heat passively into the atmosphere around them. This is especially true due to the small surface area of a cell phone.
In a car, you can transfer heat efficiently to outside the vehicle or into the vehicle’s cabin if it needs heat - the heat pumps on a Tesla are 200-300% efficient at most temperatures. Conversely, on cell phones, battery heat must be limited due to the critical and heat-sensitive components (screen, chips, cameras, sensors) that are all tightly packed into the phone’s battery.
Due to Tesla’s BMS (battery management system), Tesla can keep the vehicle’s batteries and surrounding components in a much more ideal range than cell phones. The system will not only cool down batteries, but also warm them up to produce efficiency and faster charging.
The final trick under the charge mat is beam steering. In a recent patent, Tesla explained that they intend to steer the beam of wireless energy by altering the induced current across the wireless charging pad’s coils. This will allow them to solve both the alignment and heat issues.
The alignment's precision can be achieved by steering the beam into the optimal position, while it dynamically adjusts between 'cool zones' on the receiving vehicle to prevent overheating—ensuring a steady and efficient rate of charging.
Tesla has thought out the wireless charging problem pretty deeply ever since they bought out Wiferion, and this achievement has been years in the making. We’re hoping they’ll eventually bring wireless charging compatibility to the rest of the lineup. The Cybertruck itself already has the connector prongs to be retrofitted with a wireless charging adapter, and with the Model Y Juniper Refresh around the corner, what better way to prove wireless EV charging works than to include it in the world’s best-selling car?
Following the events of We, Robot, Tesla has begun sending its customers in the U.S. and Canada another free trial of FSD. While FSD is a feature built into every Tesla, not every owner has tried it out, especially given its price tag.
However, the subscription option does provide a fairly economical way to test out FSD - but Tesla’s got something else on their minds here. Why not try out hands-free FSD for the first time for many users? While many vehicles still include FSD 12.3.6, many users are getting updated to update 2024.32.10, which FSD 12.5.4.1.
This version includes Actually Smart Summon and hands-free driver monitoring with sunglasses support.
This means it's an excellent time to give customers another chance to experience the latest FSD features.
Trial Details
The trial is coming out as an email from Tesla, offering free Full Self Driving as a complementary 30 day trial for its customers. This email ia going out to both, customers who have never tried FSD before and to customers who received the previous trial back in April.
The trial email will be sent out to customers in both the United States and Canada, and will offer 30 days of complementary, free, Full Self Driving. Within 24 hours, owners will receive a notification in the cars, saying that “Your Autopilot package has been upgraded. Enable your new feature in Autopilot settings”.
Keep in mind that the FSD version on your car software is likely FSD 12.3.6, which doesn’t include Actually Smart Summon, but you should receive an update to FSD 12.5.4.1 shortly after.
Greg Cornwaite from FB
FSD will not be enabled by default, but users will be prompted to enable FSD with a modal pop-up.
Enable the Trial
Once you've received the trial notification via email, there’s no need to subscribe to FSD or activate it in any manner. FSD will automatically show up in your vehicle, but it can take up to a day after receiving the email. Unfortunately, for some owners who may be away for work or vacation, you can not postpone the trial, and it begins immediately.
Although Tesla has moved away from the FSD Beta wording and it’s now officially called FSD (Supervised), always remember that this feature requires you to be constantly aware of your surroundings and to monitor the vehicle closely. While FSD will navigate, change lanes, and even take turns, it's imperative to stay attentive and cautious—the system is designed to assist, not replace, the driver.
What If I Already Subscribe
In the previous FSD trial earlier this year, Tesla also gave a free trial to all Tesla owners who already subscribe to FSD. This essentially gives you a month of FSD for free. We expect this trial to function the same way. After you receive the email, you should see the payment date for FSD skip a month so that you only get charged the next FSD payment after your free month ends.
Unfortunately, if you bought FSD, the offer doesn’t apply to you since you already own FSD for the life of the vehicle.
How to Get the FSD Trial
You don’t need to do anything special to get the FSD trial. Tesla isn’t sending it to everyone at once, but most owners who live in the U.S. or Canada should receive the free 30-day trial at some point in the future.
Tesla has updated its English voice for navigation guidance on newer vehicles. Many users have noted a change in the pitch and speed of the spoken text when using Tesla’s navigation system. Right now, we’re not sure whether this voice change is an indication of a larger change that’s coming, a minor tweak for better clarity, or possibly a bug.
Update: We’ve updated the article with how you can get the new voice in your existing vehicle.
Tesla Voice Guidance
A reader, known as FSDTester#420 on Tesla Motors Club, recently reached out to us to report a new nav voice. He took delivery of a new Tesla and immediately noticed that the navigation’s voice was much better than his other Tesla. The voice is noticeably faster and appears to have fewer pauses, making it sound more natural.
After posting his experience on Tesla Motors Club, other readers chimed in, saying they had the same voice in their new vehicle. The change does not appear to be affecting older vehicles, but it turns out you can update other vehicles as well (see steps below).
Video
You can listen to the navigation voice guidance in the video video below by FSDTester#420.
It turns out you can get the new voice on older vehicles as well, but it requires resetting all of your settings. X user, IRSHater69, tipped us off that a software reset may get you the new nav voice, and @brandonee916 just recently tried it and confirmed that resetting the MCU will indeed get you the new, faster voice.
If you’d like the new voice, you’ll need to factory reset your vehicle, meaning that all settings will go back to their factory defaults. You can do this by going to Controls > Service > Factory Reset. This will reset all of your vehicle settings, but most settings are now saved to your Tesla profile in the cloud, assuming you have one set up. Keep in mind that not all settings are saved to your profile and will be lost.
Settings such as browser bookmarks, trip meters, and others are not saved to your profile, and you will lose them if you factory reset your vehicle. Any drivers who don’t use a cloud account (the ones that display an avatar) will also be lost, and the driver will need to set them up again. This includes data such as seat and mirror positions, Autopilot settings, and more.
Update: Brandon has reported that his navigation voice has reverted back to the older one. It’s not clear what caused it to revert or if other users would face the same situation. If you have tried a factory reset and received the new voice, let us know.
Tesla Smart Assistant
It looks like Tesla will be updating its Voice Commands system in the future, with Musk recently saying that Tesla will support Grok AI in the car. Tesla’s current voice commands are limited and require you to say phrases in a very specific way, although they do give you access to the most common features (Top 10 Tesla Voice Commands).
Overall, voice commands are not very smart – and they’re nothing like using Google Gemini with Voice or other modern AI-based assistants. Back in January, Tesla began implementing a smart assistant in China – which brought things beyond just vehicle control, like weather updates, stock market information, language translation, and even poetry.
However, this never made its way out of China, even though Tesla’s smart voice assistant has been sitting dormant in the software for quite a while. It looks like we’ll get a wake-word, similar to the common “Hey, Tesla” – it could even be “Hey, Grok” – if we get full Grok integration as previously hinted at by Elon Musk earlier in 2024.
Either way, for now, there haven’t been any significant changes, but this voice change we’re seeing could be related to Tesla’s upcoming smart assistant feature, where they may need a more capable, more natural sounding voice.
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