Older Teslas with ultrasonic sensors may not get the new High Fidelity Park Assist 3D visualizations

Besides the Autosteer and driver warnings fix that the 2-million strong NHTSA recall mandated, Tesla is rolling a big holiday update with many more goodies. Unfortunately, one of the best new features that the 2023 Tesla Holiday Update brings to its vehicles is seemingly not coming to older ones which still rock physical ultrasonic sensors (USS).

Tesla has been shipping its cars without USS parking sensors in the bumper since last summer, and may have saved many millions in the process as the sensors cost $144 per vehicle together with the harness. After a few months when the new vehicle batches without USS kit had neither physical sensors, nor the promised Tesla Vision-only solution for parking, it rolled out the Park Assist software feature that relies on the car's cameras for distance warnings and visualization.

New owners weren't overly impressed with the accuracy of Park Assist compared to the old USS solution, especially with low-lying objects or detecting obstacles while backing up. Tesla promised that it will keep improving the camera-only parking feature, and is now rolling the so-called High Fidelity Park Assist feature with the Holiday Update.

The option uses Tesla's Hardware HW3 or HW4 camera kits to plot the car's surroundings in 3D in real time and then color-code the changes in distance from the vehicle similar to what a LiDAR visualization would be. Unfortunately, all that new parking goodness isn't rolling out to all Teslas.

Older Tesla vehicles with USS in their bumpers, or those without Ryzen chips seem to be left out, at least for now. Hopefully, the High Fidelity Park Assist will arrive to all Tesla vehicles at some point since its users are reporting a greater increase in accuracy and general parking surrounding awareness with the new update.

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