Elon tweets "no waypoints", "car will autonavigate to your destination."

[Dr_Arthur]

It blows my mind that Tesla is spending all this time developing new games, easter eggs and unnecessary (albeit fun) features, but Tesla still hasn't developed something as basic as waypoints for navigation!!!

Hell, even cars from the 2000s had waypoints on their in-car nav systems ffs!

It's super frustrating that Tesla is overlooking how fundamentally important waypoints are; especially for a high-end vehicle. Do they not realize how frequently people travel from point A to point B via multiple midpoints!?! This happens basically every road trip.

The priority is to sell new cars. Existing owners come second. Unfortunate rule of business.

 

[TomServo]

When I enter my SIL and daughters address in southern MD (starting in southern IL 3 miles from I-64) the nav routes me to I-70. We perfer taking the “southern” route along I-64. So I have to enter Richmond Va as my destination. It’s frustrating

 

[gnuarm]

When I enter my SIL and daughters address in southern MD (starting in southern IL 3 miles from I-64) the nav routes me to I-70. We perfer taking the “southern” route along I-64. So I have to enter Richmond Va as my destination. It’s frustrating

Have you tried entering the destination and just driving the direction you want to follow? Eventually the car decides it's not worth it to try to follow the original route and gives you the route you want... most of the time. I think it optimizes for time, so the route it gives you should be the fastest including traffic.

 

[M3BlueGeorgia]

The good news, of course, is we apparently will get waypoint (or maybe even waypoints) in 2021.40.*

We just received 2021.36.*, so eagerly waiting to see what it looks like, when we get 2021.40.*

 

[95gator]

I love the singular “no”.

You think he would have DMd that.

 

[gnuarm]

errr #92
If Garmin can figure it out in a hand held device, Tesla should have it nailed with the in car nav.

Sooner or later Elon will figure out what normal people do with his cars

I agree. When I bought my car in 2018 one of the salesmen (saleswoman) replied to my question about waypoints and said they should tweet "Elon" about that. What an obvious sales gimmick.

I have used a handheld GPS in my car. It sucks as a navigator, but it supported waypoints.

 

[gnuarm]

Garmin hasn't figured it out .. and nor has anyone else (yet). The traveling salesman problem is the canonical example of a computer science problem that has no known algorithmic solution other than brute force .. that is, you try every solution to see which one is best.

The traveling salesman problem is solvable. It's just an intractable problem as the number of destinations gets larger (I know because I once brought a VAX computer to it's knees running a program I wrote to solve it for work). But this is not the traveling salesman problem. That is a matter of selecting the sequence of waypoints to visit. This is about simply supporting their entry with the user specifying the sequence. The car then has to do the same things it does now to pick the routes to each waypoint.

What the Garmin does (as does every other nav system) is use a series of heuristics, coupled with road data (freeway vs Main Street vs side road) to generate a reasonable approximation to an "optimal" route in a reasonable time .. and that's all it can do (it's good enough 99% of the time, which is all Garmin or anyone else needs).

AND support waypoints.

 

[gnuarm]

Even if there was no algorithmic way to map waypoints and the best solution was still “brute force,” then… just do that? Are we paying by the processor cycle here, or can we just let the giant computer on wheels math out the problem for us?

I think of it as more of a cell phone with wheels. My cell phone has about the same reliability as my Tesla and they also tell me to fix problems with updates.

 

[gnuarm]

So I can see that Tesla has convinced themselves the UI for adding waypoints in some order is challenging, but in my personal opinion (I am a 35+ year SW engineer) that's a cop out. It is simply a matter of priority, although I can see that the automatic computation of charging stops complicates matters a little. The best stop might be before the next waypoint, if you took into account routing beyond that waypoint, but might not be necessary at all if just navigating to that waypoint. This has a solution and they have plenty of compute power.

If Tesla can't figure out the UI for waypoints, they can buy ABRP and use their's. I hate their UI, but only because they keep changing improving it and I have to learn the new details. Once I learn it, it's pretty nice at this point.

Ooh, ooh! They don't even need to buy ABRP. They just need to include a browser that won't crash every time you try to use it! Wouldn't that be an idea???

 

[gnuarm]

You guys, knock it off. I'm in sales now, and don't want to remember my actual edukashon. Keep it up and I'm going to start remembering how Ingres' two phase commits work.

Well, at least you admit it. You are the guy we want to blame for everything wrong with the world... well along with lawyers. Please don't hit me for putting you on the level with lawyers...

 

[gnuarm]

I think perhaps Tesla is trying to make the experience of driving an electric car as seamless as a fossil car w.r.t. charging/refuelling. So, they want the driver to get in and just drive and not worry about range. Obsessively planning a trip due to poor charging infrastructure should not be necessary in Tesla’s view. Hence, they see the requirement for waypoints as a nice to have feature rather than something essential to being able to conveniently do a road trip.

It is exactly the charging that I want waypoints for! I want to know the charge level I'll have when I reach the charger between waypoint 1 and 2 so I know how long I'll have to charge and how much time I'll need on the road to make it all happen. With an ICE I just stop when I need gas. Much simpler problem computationally.

A good example of this thinking is when I have a 300km journey but only have 50% charge in the car at the start. Telsa’s nav will get me to charge up at the beginning of the trip for, say, 10 minutes and arrive at my destination with, say, 10% charge. What I actually do is ignore the nav and don’t charge at the beginning, drive halfway, stop to charge and have a bite to eat etc, then arrive at my destination with about 50% charge. Much better!

Tesla’s nav recommendation is more like a fossel car approach, ie fuel up in 5 minutes then drive like the clappers for 3 hours straight.

I don't know about stopping to charge at the beginning as I don't typically see that even if it is what I want to do. Doesn't the car try to charge you around the 20% point as it gives the shortest charging times to reach your destination?

That reminds me of another issue, the car is happy getting me to a destination with only 15% on the car even if there are no chargers for 65 miles (a real case). They really need to study the ABRP interface. The problem is until superchargers are 20 miles apart and never full like gas stations, the required interface is this complex.

 

[dmurphy]

well along with lawyers.

Words hurt, man. I’ve got a thick skin but this one cuts deep.

 

[EVNow]

Tesla uses 3rd party nav APIs. The APIs support waypoints - MapBox / TomTom. My guess is Tesla would have to pay more for license to use waypoints - May be they will have to upgrade to a new tier ?

 

[P=I*V]

IMHO, there’s simply no excuse for not having waypoints. Hell, even the Tesla website has that ability in their “Go Anyway” trip planner - not having it the car itself is absurd!

 

[gnuarm]

Words hurt, man. I’ve got a thick skin but this one cuts deep.

Sorry man, I was only joking about you being like lawyers...

 

[EVNow]

IMHO, there’s simply no excuse for not having waypoints. Hell, even the Tesla website has that ability in their “Go Anyway” trip planner - not having it the car itself is absurd!

Yes - thats why I'm wondering what the reason is.

 

[P=I*V]

Yes - thats why I'm wondering what the reason is.

So I just installed 2021.40.6 and one of the key features is the ability to add stops in navigation.

 

[EVNow]

So I just installed 2021.40.6 and one of the key features is the ability to add stops in navigation.

Yes - I know - thats why we are all discussing this again. I'm also tracking what navigation Tesla uses for FSD Beta.

FD Beta : TomTom Map, Roundabouts and the Speedlimit

TL;DR : Let us use this thread to talk about map changes that could potentially make FSD Beta behave better Thanks to the post below by @MP3Mike I discovered an interesting little fact. Tesla probably does use TomTom maps rather than Google or OpenStreet for city FSD Beta driving. I've two...

teslamotorsclub.com

 

[swaltner]

I'll start by saying that I'm really happy to have waypoints (stops) in the navigation system. It will make it much easier to make side trips off the Supercharger network and make sure you have enough range to make it back to an Interstate to the next Supercharger location.

I installed 2021.40.6 on my 2018 Model 3 today and tried out the Add Stop feature. Seems to work fine as a first attempt. I'm assuming these features aren't (currently) available, but just wanting to make sure I didn't miss something.

• Once a stop has been added to the current destination, the only way to remove it appears to be to set a new final destination and start adding other stops again
• You are only allowed to add stops to the very beginning of the route. If your current destination includes a stop and a final destination, you can't add a new stop between the current stop and the final destination, that is, until you pass the first stop, at which point, you are adding the stop to the beginning of the current route
• You are not allowed to reorder the stops if you have multiple stops entered in a route
• If you don't click the continue trip button while near a stop, the navigation system will continue to try to navigate you back to the previous stop. The fix is to wipe the current route and add extra stops back into the route. I noticed this when driving past an intermediate stop; not one that I actually parked at and got out of the car at.

Just a couple limitations that I noticed on the first use. Not a huge deal and I can work around those if I know they really are limitations. I was just wanting to make sure I didn't miss something obvious with the button pushing during my trip tonight.

 

[AustinP]

Good summary.
I’d like to be able to reorder the stops, like it can easily be done with Google maps for instance.
We’ll see what the future updates will bring.