Teslas with ultrasonic parking sensors can get the new High Fidelity Park Assist 3D visualization update

Tesla's Autopilot and AI head Ashok Elluswamy finally answered the pressing question that has been on every older USS Tesla owner's mind since it announced the 2023 Holiday Update with the new High Fidelity Park Assist feature. It brings high-res 3D mapping and visualizations of the car's surroundings in real time, including painted parking lines, instead of the usual 2D obstacle band:

"This is an extension of our Occupancy Network, with much higher resolution to help with tight parking maneuvers," clarifies Tesla's AI chief. "The obstacles are modeled as a continuous distance field. This allows us to represent arbitrary shapes in a smooth and computationally efficient way. The vehicles you see are not some fixed meshes, but the network's real-time prediction of the shape," he added.

The interactive 3D mapping and visualizations are unlike anything that Tesla has issued so far indeed. The update compensates somewhat for the many months of frustration that owners of newer vehicle batches that ship without ultrasonic sensors (USS) had to endure. At one point, they had neither the USS bumper kits that Tesla removed them to save $144 per car, nor the Park Assist software that uses the Tesla Vision camera set to help with parking.

3D High Fidelity Park Assist on Teslas with USS

While both the USS and camera-only Park Assist solutions have their sets of advantages and drawbacks, those owners who had to wait for months on any parking solution finally got some bragging rights. The new High Fidelity Park Assist feature is seemingly only rolling out to their cars, while Tesla reportedly segregates the update along the AMD Ryzen/Intel chips line, too.

According to Elluswamy, however, Tesla cars with ultrasonic sensors are also getting the 3D Park Assist update at some point. He confirmed that the high fidelity 3D parking visuals "should eventually go to cars that have ultrasonic sensors as well," comforting everyone that "this is the v1 release of this technology, and will have follow up releases that have even better geometric consistency with the cameras, and better persistence of occluded obstacles."

It still remains to be seen what "eventually" means in terms of the timeframe for the arrival of 3D Park Assist to Tesla cars with ultrasonic parking sensors.

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