Elon Musk Says Tesla’s Improved Navigation, Map System ‘Almost Done’

A software update from Tesla will bring to the electric cars a new navigation platform that is “light-years ahead of current system,” but when exactly this update will be rolled out is not quite known. Tesla CEO Elon Musk only said “Almost done” on his Twitter account Saturday evening, in response to someone asking him to “fix routing for heavy traffic.”

In December, Musk was replying to another Tesla driver from the Netherlands when he said the navigation system overhaul was being tested before being rolled out in early 2018.

We are already in March, and since the system is still not ready for public release, a lot of Tesla drivers are wondering when they could actually expect the new, improved feature. A discussion on the forum on Tesla’s own website had only a few comments, with only one suggesting some sort of a timeline. And even that, from a member called Dramsey gave an estimate of between three and six months. Another comment by a forum member called RedShift was more critical: “Finally, Elon is changing his forecasts to more concrete data points like ‘almost done’. :-)”

A Tesla hacker called verygreen gave Electrek a preview of what the new system could look like, based on the hacker being able to activate the system in his own car. The new version seems “smoother and more detailed” than the current system, verygreen told the website. How the routing engine would be different is not yet known, though.

Another tweet from Musk on Saturday revealed the Model 3 — Tesla’s mass-market sedan — still has bugs, and that the company’s software team has not been able to work faster on things like the navigation system because it has been fixing the Model 3 problems. This, despite the fact that the sedan has now been in production for a few months already. Musk, however, said those fixes are “mostly done now”

Musk also said he would add two new features to the list of things to include in future updates, both of which were requested by the same person on Twitter. One of those was to automatically open the cars’ sunroof on hot days to the “vent” position, when parked, so the car wouldn’t feel like a hotbox if parked in the open. The other was to close the sunroof automatically on detection of rain.

The software bugs in Model 3 could be part of the reason why its production has been slow to ramp up. Tesla hopes to get up to 2,500 cars being produced every week by the end of March, with the number slated to go up to 5,000 by end of June. The company also said, in its annual financial results announced early February, that much of its losses in the October-December quarter of 2017 were attributable to the slow production of Model 3. Musk also said Tesla could also roll out the fully-autonomous driving option by July or August 2018.

Tesla shares closed Friday trade on Nasdaq higher by 1.27 percent, outperforming most of the rest of the auto sector.