During Tesla’s earnings call yesterday evening, Tesla VP Ashok Elluswamy announced that Tesla is developing its own AI-based mapping and navigation system. This new mapping system will arrive with FSD v15 and combine fleet data, personalized routing, and enable FSD voice control.
How Tesla’s Current Maps Work
Tesla’s current navigation combines third-party content with software developed in-house. As explained in coverage of Tesla’s Preferred Routes rollout, Google supplies content via APIs, including map tiles, street-level data, satellite imagery, points of interest, and traffic information. Tesla builds the app and calculates routes itself, allowing it to account for Supercharging and personalized routing.
During the earnings call, a shareholder raised a question around FSD issues with speed-limit recognition, parking and route selection. Elluswamy agreed, saying, “You’re totally right that we shouldn’t be depending on external people’s maps.”
He then confirmed that Tesla is developing its own AI-based maps that will address some of the FSD issues we’re seeing today, such as speed limits, parking and routing.
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AI Maps That Learn Your Preferences
Elluswamy stated that this will be a completely new architecture and it won’t just be another mapping solution. He says that it’ll be “essentially AI-based mapping and navigation,” possibly meaning that Tesla’s own fleet will map streets and annotate data such as traveling speed, stop signs, traffic lights, parking lots, and more.
It Will Open a Whole New World
A new map architecture will open up a whole new world for Tesla and what’s possible. There’s a lot of data Tesla can add to maps to not only address FSD issues such as routing and speeding, but also to make traveling smoother and safer, such as annotating potholes, blind driveways, dangerous intersections, and more.
This will likely also be the solution that improves parking and lets users customize how and where they want their vehicle to park in a parking lot. Users should be able to pick from closest available, away from other cars, handicap, and more, and the fleet will help collect this data.
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Elluswamy also stated that this map will allow Tesla to let users customize their route by voice, which sounds like the Grok feature that will let us control FSD that is slated for this fall.
Tesla already started offering Preferred Routes with Tesla’s 2026 Summer Update. Preferred Routes prioritizes your own previously driven routes when determining your route. During the same update, Automatic Navigation also gained the ability to automatically route to regularly visited destinations beyond home, work, and calendar appointments.
Preferred Routes builds on Alternate Routes, introduced in 2022, which offers up to three route choices.
First Applications Planned for FSD v15
Elluswamy expects the new maps to begin being used for trip departures and arrivals with FSD v15, then expand into the remaining navigation functions, including parking and voice control, over the following several months.
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