Tesla rumored to be pushing major Autopilot update in China soon

"Tesla China will soon push a major update to Autopilot," a well-known car blogger wrote on Weibo.  |  TSLA.US

Tesla's assisted driving software is seen as a mediocre performer in China. Now, a rumor that has inspired a lot of anticipation.

"Tesla China will push a major update to Autopilot soon," auto blogger Zheng Xiaokang, who has 532,000 followers on Weibo, said today.

The blogger, a longtime Tesla China follower, didn't mention any more information, and some speculated in the comments section of the Weibo post that the update might be Tesla's vision-only V11 software.

In 2021, Tesla begins the transition to a vision-only Tesla Vision by removing radar from the Model 3 and Model Y, followed by the Model S and Model X in 2022.

On the Model 3 page of its China website, Tesla says the Tesla Vision processing system detects nearby vehicles to reduce the risk of collisions and assists in parking.

With a 360-degree field of view from the vehicle's front, side and rear cameras, the system has powerful vision processing capabilities and can detect distances of up to 250 meters, according to the text on the page.

Tesla has a factory in Shanghai that produces the Model 3 and Model Y.

Today, in most parts of the world, the Model 3 and Model Y are already based on the Tesla Vision solution, which relies only on cameras. But both models currently being delivered by Tesla in China still come with radar.

Earlier this month, multiple regulatory filings revealed that Tesla declared the Model Y without radar in China, which may mean that the SUV may be the first Tesla model to remove radar in China.

Tesla is one of the world's most capable automakers in terms of autonomous driving, though its assisted driving software in China pales in comparison to some of its local peers.

Several local car companies, including XPeng (NYSE: XPEV) and NIO (NYSE: NIO), are fast-tracking testing of their advanced assisted driving software and are getting many positive reviews on social media.

On March 16, XPeng announced that its P5 sedan will receive its seventh vehicle OTA upgrade, which will make its Tesla FSD-like City Navigation Guided Pilot (City NGP) feature available in Shenzhen after Guangzhou.

City NGP can achieve up to 90 percent of the efficiency of a human driver and can easily handle heavy traffic during peak commuting hours and complex road conditions, XPeng said.

At the end of last month, NIO began allowing owners of all its NT 2.0 platform vehicles to apply for a trial of NOP (Navigate on Pilot) Plus assisted driving software, which enables a point-to-point assisted driving experience on highways and urban expressway scenarios.

NIO begins allowing all NT 2.0 models to trial NOP+ assisted driving software