Elon Musk talks Tesla Autopilot rewrite, says ‘a lot of new functionality in 2-4 months’

Elon Musk made new comments about Tesla’s Autopilot rewrite and now puts a timeline of 2-4 months before it can be released to the public with more functionalities.

As we previously reported, Tesla is going through “a significant foundational rewrite in the Tesla Autopilot.” As part of the rewrite, Musk says that the “neural net is absorbing more and more of the problem.”

It will also include a more in-depth labeling system.

Earlier this year, the CEO said that it was almost ready, but we haven’t seen the update just yet.

Now Musk commented on Twitter last night with an update about the Autopilot rewrite:

Going well. Team is kicking ass and it’s an honor to work with them. Pretty much everything had to be rewritten, including our labeling software, so that it’s fundamentally ‘3D’ at every step from training through inference.

In another tweet, the CEO said that he believes the update is two to four months away:

A lot of functionality will happen all at once when we transition to the new software stack. Most likely, it will be releasable in 2 to 4 months. Then it’s a question of what functionality is proven safe enough to enable for owners.

It would put it in the late third quarter or early fourth quarter.

We recently reported on a talk by Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s head of AI and computer vision, who discussed Tesla’s current effort to improve labeling.

Electrek’s Take

It’s nice to get a timeline on the rewrite, but it’s unclear how it plays into the plan for full self-driving.

Last year, Elon announced Tesla’s plan to deploy 1 million “Robotaxi” vehicles for a self-driving ride-sharing network by the end of 2020.

Now he is talking about Tesla deploying the rewrite in two to four months, and while he says that it will bring “a lot of functionality,” it doesn’t sound quite like a robotaxi.

I don’t blame Tesla for rewriting the Autopilot software. It’s an incredible thing that they are trying to achieve, and I think their vision-based approach is the right one, but it’s also normal that they have to adjust the execution along the way.

However, I am not too confident about full self-driving (pending regulatory approval) by the end of the year.

What do you think? Let us know in the comment section below.