Tesla has begun reaching out to some its early Foundation-series Cybertruck customers to offer them the opportunity for a free upgrade of one of their drive units.
They seem to be doing this for both the Dual-Motor AWD variant, as well as the Tri-Motor Cyberbeast variant. So far, we’ve confirmed two such occurrences.
Drive Swaps
In the messages from Tesla Service, Tesla confirms that they are conducting a study on drive units in early Cybertruck vehicles and that some owners are being selected to participate. At the next service visit, Tesla will replace one of the current drive units, with a brand-new unit – one that is intended to improve efficiency and reliability.
Tesla Service also confirms that this isn’t a cause for concern and that the vehicle is still safe to drive in the meantime. This doesn’t seem to have been prompted by a recall, but is instead Tesla looking to perhaps take apart well-used drive units from its early models, and examine them for wear and tear so that they can be improved in future iterations.
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Tesla recently added ambient accent lighting to several of its vehicles, including the 2024 Model 3 Highland Refresh and the Cybertruck. Additionally, the Model Y in China also received ambient lighting, but this hasn’t come to other regions yet.
As part of update 2024.26.1, Tesla is adding on to the already great ambient lighting feature. In update 2024.14 Tesla added the ability for the ambient lights to turn red when you enter Service Mode, which is a nice touch.
Now, they’re taking it a step further with update 2024.26.1. You’ll now be able to control the brightness of the ambient lights in the Cybertruck and the 2024 Model 3. Previously, you could adjust the color to whatever you liked, but not how bright they were. The brightness of the lights was directly linked to the brightness of the vehicle display.
Tesla has also added a new “Night Only” option, which turns on the accent lights when conditions outside get dim. This is a nice addition, as while the strips are visible during daytime, in direct-light they’re not very noticeable. While LEDs do last for a considerable amount of time, this could help reduce the wear on the accent lights and let them last longer.
If you want to adjust the brightness or enable the new Night Only mode, you can navigate to Controls, and then look under Lights > Accent Lights. Since this is now uncoupled from the vehicle display brightness, you won’t have to worry about having your display too bright at night.
We’re not quite sure yet whether this applies to the Chinese Model Y with accent lighting, but it should.
We’re happy to see Tesla updating the accent light controls with the ability to adjust the brightness. Next up, we’re hoping to see Tesla change the color of the lights for certain features, such as when there’s a vehicle in your blind spot and perhaps even fun things such as syncing to the music being played.
Tesla added some long-awaited features in update 2024.26.1, which we’ve dubbed the Summer Update, due to the huge amount of new features that have been added.
The update has rolled out to just a small fraction of the fleet, but it’ll continue to roll out to more features in the coming weeks.
Two of the new features in this update have been hotly requested – a Weather Forecast and an Air Quality Index (AQI) indicator. So, let’s take a look at what’s been added.
Weather Forecast
Tesla has added a two-part weather UI to all vehicles in the 2024.26.1 update. The first portion is a forecast preview, located at the top of the screen, next to the current time and current outdoor temperature. There will be an icon that displays the current weather – overcast, cloudy, rainy, sunny, snowing – there should be plenty of preset weather types to see.
The second part is what happens when you tap on that icon or the current temperature. This will display a pop-out menu showing the forecast for the day, including current temperature and conditions, as well as a scrollable hour-by-hour forecast. It’ll also include the chance of rain, humidity, wind (and direction), UV Index, and Air Quality Index information.
The weather forecast and AQI in the status bar
Greggertruck/X
Air Quality Index
The Air Quality Index originally came to China a couple of years ago. In China, this information is displayed constantly on the vehicle UI. However, in North America and Europe, the AQI information in the UI is only shown if the AQI is considered “poor” or lower. If it’s below the threshold, it’ll be displayed next to the current temperature in the status bar.
If it’s not being shown, and you want to know what it is – the expanded weather prompt (by touching the weather forecast or temperature icons) – will show the current AQI at the bottom.
The Air Quality Index ranges from 0-500, with a lower number meaning cleaner air. We’re not quite sure how Tesla has categorized them, but the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), defines the AQIs as below:
AQI Value
EPA Condition
Tesla Condition
0 to 50
Good
Good
51 to 100
Moderate
Moderate
101 to 150
Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups
Poor
151 to 200
Unhealthy
Unhealthy
201 to 300
Very Unhealthy
300 to 500
Hazardous
We haven’t seen the Tesla names for ‘Very Unhealthy’ and ‘Hazardous’, but we’d expect them to be similar.
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