Shares of Tesla were up more than 2%, at $208, in early trading Monday after CEO Elon Musk tweeted that the company’s long awaited maps and navigation software upgrade will launch this weekend.
“New nav starts rolling out this weekend,” Musk wrote early Monday. “Should be considered a mature beta at first, so won’t be perfect, but will improve rapidly. With the old system, we were stuck with legacy 3rd party black box code and stale data. No way to improve.”
The new system has been in the works for some time now. Electrek reported in July that Tesla was working to revamp its navigation software using open source map data from MapBox and Valhalla. A hacker going by the name “verygreen” was able to install the new “Tesla Maps” in his vehicle ahead of the official launch, the blog reported.
Tesla has had a rough start to the year, with shares falling almost 6% since January 1 on a string of critical reports about the company’s ability to maintain healthy production levels and meet delivery expectations for its new mass-market Model 3 sedan.
Shares closed down more than 2% Friday following a fatal crash involving a Model X in Mountain View, California.
Still, Wall Street believes the stock can rise another 9.4%, to $329, in the next 12 months, according to analysts polled by Bloomberg. Markets were up more than 2% on the whole, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq’s gains fueled by Tesla as well as Microsoft, which was up more than 5% thanks to an upgrade from Morgan Stanley.
