Tesla has made some significant improvements with FSD 12.4, primarily, the removal of the steering wheel nag under certain conditions. However, there’s a caveat – you can’t wear sunglasses.
According to Elon Musk, FSD v12.5 will introduce support for nag-free FSD, even if you’re wearing sunglasses.
With the start of the rollout of FSD v12.5, OG testers immediately noticed that vision monitoring didn’t support sunglasses. Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s Autopilot Director commented on the FSD release and mentioned that the merge of city and highway stacks and vision-monitoring’s support for sunglasses would come in a point release to FSD 12.5.
FSD V12.5 is an Upgrade
Ashok Elluswamy also took to X recently to mention that v12.5 is a big improvement to FSD v12.4. While he didn’t mention any specific details, this lines up with some of Musk’s previous comments that each FSD v12 iteration will see major improvements to the FSD model.
Elon also mentioned that while Tesla has a massive fleet of cars, their laser focus on making FSD work, rather than touting every daily achievement – has been their key to making generalized self-driving cars work.
FSD v12 has been pretty much a complete rewrite of the FSD city streets software stack, with drastic improvements over FSD v11. However, certain parts of the software stack haven’t been updated yet. Some features, like the updated highway stack are expected to be in FSD v12.5, which Musk confirmed recently. However, other features such as Park Seek and Banish Autopark, which were expected to arrive with FSD V12.4 are still up in the air.
What about V12.4?
FSD V12.4.3 is currently out to about 5% of the fleet (about 20-25% of FSD users) and hasn’t been pushed out again since about July 10th. Our new auto updating statistics pages can help break this down for folks who are curious.
Given that it’s been some time since any new vehicles have received V12.4.3, it seems the rollout has been stopped. There could be any number of reasons for this – including software bugs, or a lack of confidence with FSD. Additionally, it could just halted in favor of focusing resources on V12.5.
While we’d love to see more vehicles get v12.4.3, we’re likely to see v12.5 being the next big wave of deployments to customers. Either way, early-access testers and Tesla ADAS testers will receive these updates first, and then they’ll roll out to the vast majority of customers once Tesla feels confident there aren’t any major issues. Tesla does all this testing in the name of safety, and it's essential that bug-free versions of FSD are the versions that are rolled out wide.
So, for now, leave your sunglasses on and hang tight for the next FSD update.
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Following its recent launch in the United States and Canada, Tesla has launched their referral program in several European countries as well.
The program is available in Germany, Norway, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and possibly others. The program is almost the same as the one available today in North America, with rewards for each referral and a discount for those referred. The cap in Europe is also ten per year.
This program comes right on the heels of a 0% financing offer for the Model Y in Sweden and France. While referrals aren't currently available in Sweden, the 0% financing still is.
European Referrals
The European Referral program accounts for country and local currency, where applicable.
Country
Referral Discount
Referral Award
UK
£1,000
£500
Germany, France, Netherlands
€1,000
€500
Norway
kr11,500
kr5,750
The referral reward program is comparable to the one available in North America. After exchange rates, there is only an approximately 10% difference between the available rewards in the US and EU.
Other Countries
We expect this program to start rolling out to other European countries over the next few days or weeks, as Tesla continues to expand its referral program.
Tesla has confirmed that they submit app updates for Android and iOS apps at the same time, but we often see the iOS app updates released first possibly due to a quicker app review process at Apple.
However, we often see features implemented on the Apple version weeks or months before they’re implemented on Android. Today, the Android app is missing several key features, and the gap is starting to become a bit glaring.
Delayed App Updates
The Android app just received update 4.36.6 last night, while the Apple update was available as of September 1st.
That might not seem like a big deal, but in order to use the updated Actually Smart Summon, you’ll need app version 4.36.6, so any Andriod users that received update 2024.27.20 with the new Summon, couldn’t use it until yesterday.
We’re sure Tesla is on it, but it’s disappointing to see that key feature updates take days or a week longer to receive on Android. Apple and Google both offer the ability to set a release date for an app update, so Tesla could coordinate releasing the apps at the same time.
Ultra Wideband Support
Unfortunately, there’s no Ultra Wide Band (UWB) support on Android yet, which is an interesting omission since it’s such a great feature. Most Android phones, flagships, and cheaper phones alike, all support UWB.
Without UWB support Android phones can’t use Tesla’s newest phone key, which is only available for devices that support UWB. The new phone key improves reliability for unlocking the vehicle and setting the correct Tesla driver profile. To support the new phone key, you need a compatible phone (iPhone 11 or newer) and a newer vehicle that supports ultra wideband.
Hands-Free Trunk
Tesla’s new hands-free trunk feature, which allows you to automatically open your trunk by simply standing behind it for a couple of seconds, also isn’t available on Android devices. Tesla’s Hands-Free Trunk requires UWB support too, and Tesla originally mentioned it was coming to Android in May 2024.
For now, those are the features we know of that don’t work on Android today, and we’re hoping that Tesla brings both UWB support, as well as simultaneous app updates to the Google Play and Apple App Store by leveraging each store’s publish date feature.
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Tesla Android Project enables you to run Android apps in your Tesla. The platform is Open Source and you can deploy it on your own Raspberry Pi 4. Consider supporting the initiative by donating or purchasing the Compute Module 4 Bundle that delivers the best experience. Get $20 off by using the code: NotATeslaApp
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