Over the past few weeks, there’s been growing concern from Australian Tesla owners with a delay in software updates, as compared to the rest of the world.
As someone who covers a lot of Tesla news, I’ve had lots of people reaching out to me for an explanation, with many starting draw their own conclusions to explain the delay.
Today, I reached out to Tesla PR and to their credit, they provided a comment on the question.
The current situation
What we see from the data on 3rd party services TeslaScope and TeslaFi, is that there are more than 26 other countries that are on later builds (often including the holiday update).
- The latest build in Australia is 2024.38.7
- The latest FSD V13 branches are on the 2024.39.x branch
- The latest build is 2024.44.x
Some have suggested this is a RHD issue, but the UK are getting builds, so that doesn’t make sense.
Some have suggested this relates to ADRs alignment with UNECE regs, but they are still draft, so that doesn’t make sense.
Some have suggested this is related to the DFO Sydney accident/investigation earlier in the month, this seems unlikely as Tesla has provided vehicle data many times before without issue (I expect the same is true here and shows human erro).
The reason so many are excited and growing impatient, is that Tesla’s Holiday Update has a lot of great features owners are excited by.
Tesla’s comment on Aussie Updates
As mentioned above, I contacted Tesla PR and got the following statement.
The only comment Tesla can provide is that software updates can take several weeks to reach all cars.
Cars connected to Wi-Fi are likely to get all updates sooner.
The first part of this comment, suggests there’s nothing new or different about the rollout, that there is no hold up, we’re just waiting for it to be rolled to us (after other parts of the world).
Having experienced software updates over the last 5 years, across 2 vehicles, we are typically on the leading edge of global rollouts, this feels very different than anything we’ve experienced before.
The second part of the statement is really interesting. Cars connected to WiFi are likely to get updates sooner.. This is news to me. I understood that that Tesla had a list of vehicle VINs and when that car was ready to receive an update, they pushed the update to the vehicle, prompting the user through their mobile app and the in-car display.
Obviously to download the update, the WiFi connection is required, but the suggestion that cars on WiFi (basically at home), would get it first, is a new piece of information.
Personally I’ve been checking most days, visiting the Software page and scrolling to the bottom to make the car check it has the latest software. There has been times in the past where doing this has unveiled the software update, however the vast majority of updates I’ve experienced have been through the push notification to the phone, or the orange arrow at the top of the display, indicating an update was available (and that I needed to connect to WiFi to get it.
While this update doesn’t give us absolute confirmation we’ll have the Holiday Software Update before Christmas next Wednesday, it is I believe confirmation there’s no technical, regulatory, or political issue that is blocking updates from flowing to Australia.
