Tesla Autopilot

Why Tesla Dashcam feature won’t be coming to AP1 vehicles

Elon announced recently that a dashcam feature will be enabled in the upcoming v9 software update. Tesla owners have been waiting for this feature for over a year, after Elon mentioned it last year as arriving “soon”. Now that this feature is getting closer though, I’ve noticed Tesla AP1 car owners asking if this applies to them as well. So, does it? No, and here is why.

The AP1 cars have a single camera mounted in the front, which is made by a company called Mobileye. That hardware interprets the image of the camera, and sends this information on. It does not actually send the video stream to the cars main computer, the MCU.

But, what about the crash recordings?

In 2016 Jason Hughes was able to pull crash data from the MCU of a salvaged Tesla Model S. Because of this it is easy to assume that AP1 cars could get the same features. What happens though, is that the Mobileye device stores some frames, which are dumped to the MCU if in incident occurs.

Jason Hughes also confirmed that while the Mobileye device does store some frames, there is no way for the MCU to retrieve live video from the camera.

Which models will get the Dashcam feature?

As of now, it looks like only AP2.5 cars will be getting the feature. Perhaps in the future AP2 vehicles will also get the dashcam feature, but there is no official word out on that yet. With the current hardware, it wouldn’t be in proper color anyway. This is because of the grey, grey, grey, red camera sensor.

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I'm a webdeveloper based in Oslo, Norway. I currently work with web development at Nettmaker.

I would like to change the world, but they won't give me the source…

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