In his most recent tweet from about an hour ago, Elon Musk showed a positive response on the idea of displaying the side-cameras feed on the center touchscreen while backing up the car, the affirmation from the Tesla CEO came in the same discussion thread where he started a poll for Gigafactory Texas.
As we can see in the featured photo above taken from a Tesla Model 3 backing up, the rear camera feed is wide but still there are blind-spots on both sides, this became the reason for a useful question from Tesla Owners Silicon Valley and a prompt reply from Musk.
Showing the feed from all three cameras would be a little UI and UX challenge for the Tesla software team but they will eventually figure it out with some experimenting, Tesla always has the option to improve the user-experience with newer updates.
Yes
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2020
Tesla’s design decision to install the side cameras integrated with the side-repeaters is deviant to traditional automakers choice of installing them with the side mirrors — in Teslas this side-cameras until now have been used for Autopilot‘s vision and catching vandals using the Sentry Mode.
Now it seems that in a near-future Tesla over-the-air software update, the side-camera feed will be available for a wider view of the surroundings on the sides and rear of the car, will definitely help backing up the car more safely.
The original idea of using side-view mirrors for backup feed came from Rob Hoehn/Tesla Ideas and he also pitched another idea in this thread for having an option of bird’s eye view of the car — tilting down the side view mirrors in reverse gear would also be cool, a Toyota Corolla has that feature, why not a Tesla.
Bird’s Eye View when backing up: https://t.co/6uiOOSExl2 #teslaideas
— Rob Hoehn (@rhoehn) February 5, 2020