Speed assist for older model S?

Every GPS I own displays the speed limit on the main road near my house at 30 mph. It is actually 45 mph. Around 5 years ago the road was widened and the speed limit was 30 mph during construction. My house was built in 1957. I have yet to find a GPS that knows where my house is located. There is no way I would allow a GPS to adjust the speed of my car.

stevej119 said:

Is there anyone else who wonders why speed assist (adjusting cruise control to posted limit) is only available on newer models with all the new sensors and camera? My 2013 Ford Fusion displayed the speed limit on all highways based on gps data and was quite accurate. The moment I passed a sign with a change in the limit, it changed on my dash display. We've all got GPS data on our Model S'. Depending on a camera to find speed limit signs doesn't seem terribly reliable, anyway. What if you have a truck in the lane next to you blocking your view of the sign? I'm hopeful that those of us with cars produced before September will see this feature in an upcoming software update.

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I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be automatic with AutoPilot. Lane changing will require a press of the turn signal. Maybe the plan would be for speed changes to require confirmation: car displays speed displayed by sign, driver confirms speed.

stevej119 said:

Is there anyone else who wonders why speed assist (adjusting cruise control to posted limit) is only available on newer models with all the new sensors and camera? My 2013 Ford Fusion displayed the speed limit on all highways based on gps data and was quite accurate. The moment I passed a sign with a change in the limit, it changed on my dash display. We've all got GPS data on our Model S'. Depending on a camera to find speed limit signs doesn't seem terribly reliable, anyway. What if you have a truck in the lane next to you blocking your view of the sign? I'm hopeful that those of us with cars produced before September will see this feature in an upcoming software update.

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I think Tesla has been pretty clear that if you don't have the required hardware that you won't see this feature but I may have missed the announcement. There is apparently a lot of wiring needed for the new sensors and it would be an entire day worth of labor at Tesla service rates to replace it so they won't offer it.

Our $150 Tom Tom had this capability built in 5 years ago (database lookup based on location I presume). It was accurate 95% of the time and did a great job warning me when I exceeded the speed limit. It also worked very well pinging me 5 seconds before encountering a speed camera, both of which saved me countless times I'm sure from speeding violations in Germany. I'm also sure our older Teslas could do this too, if Tesla wanted to make it happen.

dsm363 said:

I think Tesla has been pretty clear that if you don't have the required hardware that you won't see this feature but I may have missed the announcement. There is apparently a lot of wiring needed for the new sensors and it would be an entire day worth of labor at Tesla service rates to replace it so they won't offer it.

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TeslaTap put together an estimate for adding Autopilot. It came out to around $67k mostly due to the labor. In order to have everything you end up having to replace a lot of parts which ends up requiring a pretty extensive dis-assembly of the car to do. Some of that may be high for some cars because it assumes adding some things you may already have but I think it illustrates the futility of trying to add Autopilot to existing cars.

I just don't see Tesla engineering the feature for old cars. The speed assist is the only thing you'd be able to implement without adding sensors. The implementation in the Autopilot enabled cars uses the camera which is used for a lot of other things. So I think they used the camera for this because they already needed the camera for other things and adding speed limit data to their GPS system would require a separate effort for just that one feature.

They've said NO..if you want any of the new features trade up.

Mai get what you're saying but I think when they designed our model s or the original model s. The hardware to see that wasn't there. There's two camera that look for the speed limits on the newer model s. The Gps I'm guessing is going off what satellite picks up which can also be unreliable in say work zones etc where the MS will be more accurate and pick that up.

breser said:

TeslaTap put together an estimate for adding Autopilot. It came out to around $67k mostly due to the labor. In order to have everything you end up having to replace a lot of parts which ends up requiring a pretty extensive dis-assembly of the car to do. Some of that may be high for some cars because it assumes adding some things you may already have but I think it illustrates the futility of trying to add Autopilot to existing cars.

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I'm kind of in a confused state. Just now brought MS and I did not mind auto pilot features.

Now every post I am reading about the autopilot features makes me want to have auto pilot features.

The very fact that Tesla is making continuous improvement in the car makes me nervous in one way that my car is getting depreciated with every improvement.

I am not jealous about the improvement but for the value of the money I am spending I want to have some value on the car 6 years later when I sell it.

I know this is not the OP's intent, but I'm considering an aftermarket MobileEye. That gives speed limits, lane departure warning and some collision warnings. This seems like the only viable retrofit for "classic" MS cars. Hmmm did I just use the word "classic" in a Tesla thread?

pilotSteve said:

I know this is not the OP's intent, but I'm considering an aftermarket MobileEye. That gives speed limits, lane departure warning and some collision warnings. This seems like the only viable retrofit for "classic" MS cars. Hmmm did I just use the word "classic" in a Tesla thread?

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Have you researched whether Tesla would allow/enable software integration for it, or would you need some other screen to interface with the MobileEye? Not trying to be a downer; genuinely curious whether Tesla is open to this kind of thing.

UberEV1 said:

Our $150 Tom Tom had this capability built in 5 years ago (database lookup based on location I presume). It was accurate 95% of the time and did a great job warning me when I exceeded the speed limit. It also worked very well pinging me 5 seconds before encountering a speed camera, both of which saved me countless times I'm sure from speeding violations in Germany. I'm also sure our older Teslas could do this too, if Tesla wanted to make it happen.

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Indeed it's likely every Model S already has the information it needs to do the non-visual (from database, not from a camera) setup you mention here. It's long been a feature of Navigon, which runs the instrument cluster portion of the navigation system. So Tesla *could* give owners without camera hardware something here, but it would probably just cause confusion about what cars get what features. I've found the Navigon speed information to be accurate 90%+ of the time, which is enough to be useful, but this allows Tesla to make a clear break in when the features came to be.

To me, it seems like getting the speed limit data accuracy in the GPS maps closer and closer to 100% is much less difficult than getting the sign-reading-interpreting-considering-exceptions accuracy closer and closer to 100%. Not to mention the incredibly larger amount of resources needed for the latter. I am talking about North America here.

Thinking out loud...

They now have cars running around with cameras to detect speed limit signs AND internet connectivity. For major roads and even minor roads in high density tesla areas they should be able to build up a dataset pretty quickly if the cars are able to send an update when they see a sign. A few algorithms to verify data based on multiple sightings and perhaps they could even sell it back to mapping companies.

brkaus said:

Thinking out loud...

They now have cars running around with cameras to detect speed limit signs AND internet connectivity. For major roads and even minor roads in high density tesla areas they should be able to build up a dataset pretty quickly if the cars are able to send an update when they see a sign. A few algorithms to verify data based on multiple sightings and perhaps they could even sell it back to mapping companies.

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Excellent idea (I believe Google does something similar for their traffic data). Heck, just keep it internal and use it as a competitive advantage.