Software Update!

I know last time I said that my next post would be on the energy required to refine petrol, but then this fun diversion happened!

This is one of the more magical bits of the Tesla experience, and the first time we’ve had an update on our S. For the record, we were updated from 17.5.28 to 17.9.3 — both of which are version of the 8.0 firmware. (8.1 is apparently coming soon.)

The Process

What happens is you get a notice, in my case on my phone because I’ve connected the app to the car. You can schedule an install time later in the day, or you can choose to install now. An estimate of how long it will take is provided, and I was told to assume it would take the full time (in this case 1h40m) as you can’t drive the car while the install is in progress.

You can change your scheduled install time, and once I knew I had a window of 2h without having to drive the car, I went for the ‘install now’ option, and then stepped away. In the end it ended up taking less than 45 minutes. Once complete, you get release notes that explain what was updated.

The Features

There’s a lot to read in the release notes. Mostly the new stuff seems to be at the top, though thankfully you can exit and read them later by finding the release notes again by holding on the ‘T’ at the top of your screen to bring up the ‘about your car’ screen, and then clicking on the software release notes link.

I have to say that the experience of your car getting better with a software update is pretty cool. We have a ‘hardware 2.0’ car, and so we’re still catching up in terms of autopilot features. This time around, the major items we’ve added are:

• Auto parallel parking
• Auto steer speed limit incrased to 90 km/h
• Auto steer available on ‘local roads’

We haven’t had the chance to try out any of these features yet, but will get there tomorrow. Next time, back to the discussion about energy usage in the petroleum refinement process.

GD