Another free car upgrade: adaptive high beams.

The sun had set on our way west from near Bega towards Bombala. We generally prefer to find a place to stay before dark, but this time of year the daylight is shortening, and we discovered there aren’t many accommodation options out here.

High beam headlights help us travel along the unfamiliar road in the dark, lighting up not only the path ahead, but on the sides, such as helping us keep a lookout for wildlife that might dart onto the road. When we pass the occasional other vehicle, we of course don’t want to blind them with our high beams. Until now, the Tesla would automatically detect the oncoming car and dip the high beams, just like we would do manually.

The latest software update 2024.14, was sent to our Tesla a few days ago. It included several new features, one of which is adaptive high beams. Now, instead of dipping the whole high beam lamps when there is an oncoming vehicle, it only dims the pixels of light that are aiming at that vehicle. It moves the black patch of absent light along, following the path of the vehicle until it has passed. It’s like watching some Top Gun missile tracking system!

As you can see in these photos, taken from the Tesla’s Dashcam, the light from our high beams stays on, lighting up the side of the road and the road ahead that has no oncoming vehicle. It just blacks out the oncoming vehicle. It gives us (and I presume AutoPilot) a much better view of the road. It even blocks out the light aiming at the truck off to the left, where the road curves, half a kilometre ahead.

In case you’re wondering, the Tesla can block out selected pixels because it has “matrix” headlights – a matrix (arranged in rows and columns) of individual LEDs that the computer can turn off and on individually. Our car had the matrix headlight hardware since we bought it in August 2022. But it hasn’t exploited the full advantage of them until this latest software update.