Tesla announced today that its new full self-driving computer, previously known as the Autopilot Hardware 3.0 upgrade, is now in production and the company will hold a demonstration of the new capabilities later this month.
As we previously reported, Tesla is working on an important new product that it claims will enable them to bring full self-driving capability to its vehicles: a new AI chip, or “neural net accelerator’, to be released in the Autopilot Hardware 3.0 computer upgrade.
Last year, Pete Bannon, Tesla’s chip architect in charge of the project, said that they were ramping up their manufacturing effort and aiming to start production of the Autopilot Hardware 3 computer around the end of the first quarter of 2019.
Now a few days after the end of the quarter, Tesla announced that the new computer is now in production:
“Tesla is making significant progress in the development of its autonomous driving software and hardware, including our FSD computer, which is currently in production and which will enable full-self driving via future over-the-air software updates.”
The company didn’t confirm what it means for the new computer to be in production in terms of availability inside its vehicles in production.
Last week, CEO Elon Musk clarified Tesla’s plan to retrofit cars for ‘Full Self-Driving’ with the new HW3 computer after it enters production.
Tesla owners who bought the ‘Full Self-Driving’ software package will receive the new upgrade for free when Tesla is going to start deploying more advanced software that is taking advantage of the new hardware.
Today, the automaker announced that they will give a demonstration of that upcoming new software on April 19th:
“With a number of very exciting developments coming in the weeks and months ahead, Tesla will host investors on the morning of April 19th at our headquarters in Palo Alto to provide a deep dive into our self-driving technology and road map.”
While the event is presented as being for investors, it will be webcast for everyone to see.
Tesla described what will happen on April 19th:
“Investors will be able to take test-drives to experience our Autopilot software first-hand, including features and functionality that are under active development. Investors will also hear directly from Elon Musk, as well as VP of Engineering, Stuart Bowers, VP of Hardware Engineering, Pete Bannon, and Sr. Director of AI, Andrej Karpathy.”
The event comes as Musk has been guiding that Tesla will achieve the first iteration of its planned full self-driving system by the end of the year.
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