Tesla Is Building Its Own AI Maps for FSD, Starting With V15

Credit: Tesla

Tesla is building its own AI-based maps and navigation for FSD instead of relying on outside map providers, and the first pieces will show up in its V15 software, Tesla’s vice president of AI Ashok Elluswamy said on Tesla’s Q3 2026 earnings call on October 21. A shareholder had asked why Tesla still uses third-party maps, pointing to speed limits, parking and typical routes as the three biggest problems, and suggested letting trusted owners feed in corrections.

We touched on the answer briefly in our Q3 earnings call takeaways, but Elluswamy said more than that. “You’re totally right that we shouldn’t be depending on external people’s maps,” he said. “We are building our own maps,” he added, noting the approach is not like OpenStreetMap, the volunteer-edited map used by many apps. Instead, Tesla is building “an entirely new architecture with essentially AI-based mapping and navigation.”

Elluswamy said the system will be integrated with voice, so drivers can talk to it and ask for different routes. “It’s going to learn your personalized preferences, plus also the fleet preferences,” he said. “The collective intelligence of all the cars are going to flow into making the maps and navigation be super cool.”

On timing, he said the start and end of trips will use the technology “pretty soon as part of the V15 release.” Over the following months, Elluswamy said, it will take over “all of the navigation functions, parking, destination handling,” and will “know you better than you know yourself in some regard for the driving task.”

Navigation has been one of the most common complaints from owners who otherwise like FSD. Earlier this month, Shopify’s Farhan Thawar praised FSD v14.3.10 but criticized poor maps, no route learning and wasted detours, and Tesla engineer Phil Duan replied that improvements for potholes and navigation are coming.

Neither fix has shipped in a public release so far, and the notes for FSD v14.3.13, which reached AI4 cars this week, still list two upcoming improvements, expanding reasoning to all behaviors beyond destination handling and adding pothole avoidance.

One part of the shareholder’s question didn’t get a direct answer, since the suggestion was to let verified owners submit map input, while Elluswamy described a system that learns from fleet data rather than one owners edit by hand. Tesla also didn’t give a release date for V15 on the call, the same update it plans to use to bring its driverless software to customer cars.

Which navigation fix would you want first from Tesla’s own maps?