Well... Only Tesla can answer that
However, I doubt Tesla are making their own maps. It'd be a pretty mad thing to try and do, though that's not stopped them in the past. Why would they bother though... what's the advantage? Other companies will dedicate 100% of their time to it, forever... map quality will keep them in business, so they
have to be good at it. Capitalism at work - it's cheaper for Tesla (and all car manufacturers) to buy that stuff in, I'd have thought.
The most likely scenario is that they've licensed mapworks from Nvidia, as part of the DrivePX2 deal.
Mapworks is, I think, an amalgamation of multiple data sources, with an ability to combine live updates from any 'harvester' (vehicle with a camera + GPU), consolidated into one system. It's fairly obvious that there won't be any one company that's able to map the entire world in ≤10cm accuracy; it's just not feasible. As of today, I think Here are the main supplier for a lot of the HD mapping data used by Mapworks. (
HD Live Map explained - HERE 360) (
HERE, NVIDIA Partner on AI Technology for HD Mapping from Cloud to Car)
Where there are no HD maps to begin with, cars with cameras + GPUs can create very basic versions of these maps using ego-motion/visual odometry (basically, "motion-from-video"). They're a poor alternative (think 240p YouTube instead of 4K), but
any prior knowledge is beneficial. This is partly what's meant by 'fleet learning', though not entirely. If you're the guy driving that road for the first time ever, with no prior map of any definition, then it'll probably go back to current AP1/AP2 techniques, of following lanes/path delimiters (boundaries), and the car in front, and asking you to do most of it
Since you can't upload all that camera data to the cloud, the car actually does some basic pre-processing of the vision data onboard its own GPU... crunching it when you're *not* driving (hence why your HW2 car has the
potential to lose more battery than HW1 cars whilst parked). That pre-processed data is highly compressed, and only machine-readable... it gets transmitted back to the cloud servers, where further - more computationally expensive - processing is carried out and can be distributed ahead-of-time to other cars,
It's a more complex integration issue though... so, you license mapworks... then you have to build that into the car's actual driving systems, write path planning AI to figure out what to do and where to go on that road depending on the obstacles in your way (and respond to them appropriately). Then, it needs to hook into the regular, 2D SD maps that we use for general navigation ... it'll download the map tiles it needs ahead-of-time, in case you lose connectivity.
This is all... stuff... stuff that has to be done in a software update, not firmware.
Whether or not it's part of 8.1, I don't know. It'd be a ridiculous point release if that's the case.
Ok, I've bored myself now. Sorry.