A look at Tesla's Safety Score

September 28, 2021

By Nuno Cristovao

With the release of update 2021.32.22, Tesla released Safety Score, a feature that assesses your driving behavior. To assess your driving, Tesla is using a similar model to what they use to determine Tesla insurance rates.

By opting-in to Safety Score, you give Tesla the authority to collect certain driving metrics that Tesla will use to measure your driving behavior. Tesla will assess your risk across five major categories.

The five categories are:

Forward Collision Warnings
Hard Braking
Aggressive Turning
Unsafe Following
Forced Autopilot Disengagement

Your Safety Score is then available in the latest Tesla app (version 4.1), which is currently available to iPhone users, but will soon be available on Android as well.

Your Safety Score is rated from 0 to 100 and the app does an excellent job breaking down the score for each category and comparing it to the Tesla fleet median.

You can also dig deeper and drill down into an individual day or even a specific trip to see which drives affected your score the most. Tesla will even show you which driver profile was used for an individual trip.

Tesla is currently using this feature to decide the next batch of FSD Beta testers, but this is an excellent feature that should be available to everyone.

Safety Score is a useful feature if you’re looking to improve your safety on the road. It can also be used to monitor new drivers or even to see how your vehicle was handled when used by other individuals such as valet service or car rental services such as Turo.

Tesla Safety Score is currently limited to vehicles on 2021.32.22 and later and to owners in the US. You must opt-in through the Request FSD Beta button in the Autopilot menu.

Expect Tesla to continue improving this feature and expanding it to other regions. I would also expect Tesla to use this data to further improve their FSD Beta.

First Look at YouTube Music and Amazon Music in Update 2024.26 [Photos]

July 30, 2024

By Karan Singh

@tesla_jokes/X

Tesla recently added support for YouTube Music and Amazon Music in its most recent update – 2024.26.3. Tesla now offers 9 music services in its vehicles: Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Online Streaming (through LiveOne, formerly Slacker Radio), Caraoke, TuneIn, and traditional FM radio.

That’s quite a slew of options, but there are a few popular services remaining — notably SiriusXM and Pandora. While Tesla doesn’t cover every niche, this list now covers most users.

Amazon Music - Free Tier

On the music front, we recently reported that Tesla may soon offer Apple Music with Hi-Fi support, but it seems like Hi-Fi support isn’t being included with Amazon Music – even with a Premium subscription. However, unlike Spotify, which requires a premium subscription to play on a Tesla at all, Amazon Music can be played in a free tier.

The Amazon Music Interface

@tesla_jokes/X

In the free tier, you’ll be able to access music, curated playlists, Amazon Radio, and podcasts. You’ll still have ads, and you won’t be able to pick the specific songs you want. The next tier, Amazon Music Prime (through Amazon Prime), will provide you with ad-free music, and song selection. Both services are limited to one device streaming per account.

The highest tier – Amazon Music Unlimited, also provides lossless Hi-Fi audio and bit-perfect Hi-Fi, but not in Teslas. We could hope that this changes in the future, and Amazon and Tesla expand their offerings to include Hi-Fi audio in-vehicle. In terms of streaming, there are individual and family plans, supporting one device or up to six at once for the Unlimited tier.

YouTube Music

YouTube Music doesn’t offer lossless or offline support but does come bundled with YouTube Premium – which you can use by logging into the YouTube app on your Tesla to get ad-free video.

There is an individual plan for single-device streaming and a family plan for up to 5 concurrent devices.

Interface Commonality

The YouTube Music Interface

@tesla_jokes/X

One of the nicest things that Tesla has done here is to make the interfaces between the streaming services very similar. This means that each music service has a consistent, similar, Tesla-orientated interface. You can swap through them and maintain the same basic set of controls. Tesla works hard to integrate third-party services and we’re use many users will enjoy these additional streaming options.

Both of these services are available without Premium Connectivity while on WiFi or connected via a phone’s hotspot, but they require Premium Connectivity to stream while on LTE.

Musk Provides Timeline for FSD V12.5 on Hardware 3; Significant Improvements Coming

July 29, 2024

By Karan Singh

Not a Tesla App

In a post on X, Elon Musk confirmed that vehicles with Hardware 3 will be receiving FSD V12.5 in about 10 days.

When FSD V12.5 was rolled out initially, it only rolled out to Model Y vehicles with AI4 (Hardware 4). However, just a few days later, FSD V12.5 started rolling out to most AI4-based vehicles.

Hardware 3

Hardware 3 owners have been left feeling behind on this, especially since the divergence between Hardware 3 and AI4 wasn’t supposed to start happening until later this year. Elon has mentioned that even though AI4 is still emulating Hardware 3, the additional compute capacity available on the newer hardware makes it easier to develop.

This pretty much means that Tesla is developing for Hardware 3 but is using the unconstrained compute power of AI4 to test and do initial rollouts. After optimization, it then rolls out to Hardware 3 vehicles. This is similar to how most software is often made – on far better PCs, and then scaled down and optimized to better fit the average computer.

But Tesla clearly isn’t abandoning their Hardware 3 and Tegra-based infotainment (MCU 1) customers just yet. Update 2024.26.3 brings FSD V12 to MCU1 vehicles for the first time. These vehicles are based on an older infotainment chipset from NVIDIA. That’s a great leap in optimization and compatibility and demonstrates Tesla and Elon’s commitment to bringing Unsupervised FSD to any vehicle produced after 2016.

V12.5 is Significant

FSD V12.5.1 has also shown some amazing improvements, with the capability to navigate parking lots and unpaved/unmarked roads being demonstrated by AIDRIVR on X below. That’s one of the key components that Tesla will need for its Robotaxi, as well as for Actually Smart Summon, Park Seek, and Banish Autopark. And Elon has said that there is more to come.

FSD 12.5.1 escapes the X Takeover event pic.twitter.com/XjPPqfroNi
— ΛI DRIVR (@AIDRIVR) July 28, 2024

We haven’t heard about these features making it to FSD V12.5 just yet, but we do know that sunglasses-capable hands-free, end-to-end highway stack, more natural lane changes, and Cybertruck FSD are supposed to be coming soon. This laundry list of improvements is found in the Update 2024.20.15 Release Notes, all listed as Upcoming Improvements.

We’re excited to see FSD V12.5 coming to Hardware 3 vehicles – especially as the vast majority of Tesla’s current fleet is still on Hardware 3, not AI4. While Elon has said Tesla doesn’t envision an upgrade path between Hardware 3 and AI4 due to the complexity, there’s always a chance Tesla will develop new AI4-based hardware that meets the power consumption capabilities and space constraints of vehicles running HW3.