Turn a Tesla into a mapping vehicle with Mapillary

Tesla vehicles have often been described as “computers on wheels”. They also include cameras for assisted driving features. In the Mapillary community, these features have raised the question whether the imagery from the car’s cameras could be collected and uploaded to Mapillary. In this post, we present a solution to do exactly that. About two years ago, Tesla enabled a dashcam feature in their vehicles, which allows Tesla drivers to access the imagery collected by the vehicle’s cameras. The mode of operation is simple: plug a USB stick in one of the vehicle's USB ports, and imagery will be saved to the USB stick automatically. The task of getting imagery to Mapillary then boils down to getting the images stored on the USB drive to Mapillary. Geotagging The main challenge to overcome is that Tesla does not store the GPS tracks alongside the videos on the USB drive. This means that we need to get the GPS signal from another source. The simplest way to achieve this is to use one of ... Read full article.