Earlier this month, Tesla pushed a new over-the-air software update for Autopilot 2.0 vehicles and while the only official new feature was Automatic High Beam being enabled worldwide, it also included “improvements” to the main Autopilot features.
Some owners are now reporting the perceived changes with the latest update.
While most Autopilot 2.0 owners agree that the ‘silky smooth’ control algorithm that Tesla started pushing last month was an important improvement, the company is still fine-tuning it with every new update on their way to the transition to the promised ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ features.
Some owners see those updates as improvements and others see them as step backs.
Several owners of Autopilot 2.0 reached out to us in the past few days to give their insights on the latest update.
Frizull was really impressed and went as far as suggesting that it is starting to “feel a lot like the start of Autosteer+”, which is the upgraded version of Tesla’s active lane-keeping Autosteer under the new ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ features.
This feels a lot like the start of Autosteer+.
— Ian Bernardo (@frizull) August 26, 2017
Tesla describes the Autosteer+ feature in Autopilot 2.0:
“With the new Tesla Vision cameras, sensors and computing power, your Tesla will navigate tighter, more complex roads.”
In comparison, Autopilot 1.0 had been more geared toward highway driving – though the system can also be used with some success in local roads.
The Enhanced Autopilot on the new generation of hardware remains focused on highway driving with a goal to reach autonomous on and off-ramp driving on highways.
It’s not quite there yet even with the latest updates, but some owners are reporting significant improvements of auto lane changes on Autopilot 2.0, which is an important feature to master in order to achieve that goal.
Others have also suggested that the latest update has also improved the renderings of the vehicles around the Tesla on the instrument cluster, which had been displaying fewer cars than Autopilot 1.0 in previous Autopilot 2.0 updates.
Not every owner got the new 2017.32 update yet, but Byshop on Youtube got it and posted a short demo on a local road:
Electrek’s Take
While Tesla recently reiterated its goal to do a fully self-driving drive across the country before the end of the year using its Autopilot technology, the actual software available to customers today seems to have fallen behind the schedule that CEO Elon Musk made public.
Musk had previously guided that Tesla would be transitioning from Enhanced Autopilot to Full Self-driving capability by now, while it seems closer to transitioning from first generation Autopilot capability to Enhanced Autopilot.
The CEO has admitted that they had a difficult transition from using Mobilieye’s computer vision system in Autopilot 1.0 to their own in Autopilot 2.0.
With this said, there’s always the hope that Tesla’s use of deep learning neural nets and its computer vision system in a growing fleet could eventually result in a breakthrough moment that accelerates the pace of progress of their new system.
After all, Tesla has really only opened the floodgates of Autopilot data gathering on the new vehicles about 3 months ago.
What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.
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