Report: Teslas May Soon Get Live Streaming Feature On Autopilot

Tesla's autopilot setup has several mechanisms to help the vehicle navigate the road. One part of the equation is the 8 camera system that offers 360 degrees of vision around the car. There's also Sentry Mode, which offers a 360-degree dash cam that helps users take inventory of any potential theft attempts or damage done to their vehicle.

But while these are useful features for both keeping passengers and their vehicles safe, they are largely hands-off, with no real way for drivers to control either mode. This could be changing very soon, according to electric vehicle publication Electrek .

Electrek reports that the "green" code guru, who has discovered a number of upcoming Tesla features built into software updates, has found snippets of code indicating that Tesla could soon allow remote access to a live feed of what see the car's autopilot system.

What is the remote camera viewing and how would it work? Do you just mean sentry clips can be viewed in the phone app? If so would it use Bluetooth EDR or would you need to use Wifi and upload to Tesla first?

- mcot2222 (@ mcot2222) November 28, 2020

This could be of great help in a number of ways. Users can take a look around their car during a day with dangerous driving conditions or simply to detect potential safety issues before they occur. However, the transmission is likely used for a quick glance around the car rather than continuous viewing. According to Green, live streaming would require 30 megabytes of data per minute, which is too much for the typical LTE or 5G user.

Green doesn't know when this feature will be activated. "Well remote camera viewing seems to be on the wings, [if] they will leave it in 2020.48 or if they will postpone it again I don't know," they wrote; 2020.48 is Tesla's next software update.

This could certainly be a welcome way for Tesla owners to ring in the new year. Tesla hasn't commented on any new updates coming to its vehicles yet, but Elon Musk has been teasing an "incendiary" Tesla Christmas software release, which may well refer to this finding.