Tesla started pushing a new update to its fleet of vehicles equipped with the second generation Autopilot hardware suite tonight. The update increases the speed limits on the Autopilot’s two main features, but it’s still not to parity with the company’s first generation Autopilot.
Both Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC) and Autosteer are seeing slight 5 mph bumps in speed limit restriction with this new update (8.0.2.17.9.3):
- TACC speed limit is being increased from 80 to 85 mph (135 km/h)
- Autosteer speed limit on highways is being increased from 50 to 55 mph (90 km/h)
It should make the system a little more useful as Tesla is still improving the overall performance under the new Tesla Vision image processing system.
The update follows the addition ‘side collision warning’ and Autosteer on ‘local roads’ implemented last month.
Tesla is still working to bring the Autopilot’s performance on the latest hardware and software developed in-house to parity with the first system using Mobileye’s technology.
There’s no update on the timeline, which was first supposed to be in December 2016, but CEO Elon Musk said last month that he now expects parity to be reached in March. Theoretically, it could be any day.
Tesla Vision needs hundred of millions of miles of data in order to improve and gradually lifting speed restrictions, like with this new update, helps to broaden the use of the system and gather more data.
As we reported last week, Tesla’s ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ is currently using only 1 out of 8 cameras of the new hardware suite and therefore, we haven’t really seen what the system can do. The new features promised to Tesla owners will come when they start using more cameras, but they first need to improve the most basic features, like Autosteer and TACC.
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