The Autopilot is Tesla’s advanced assisted driving program with features like Autosteer, Autopark, and Trafic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC).
The hardware suite was first introduced in Tesla’s vehicles in September 2014. The company gradually released more and more advanced features through over-the-air software updates until the first meaningful “Autopilot Update” in October 2015 with the release of v.7.0 of Tesla OS.
In its report to the Californian DMV today, Tesla confirmed that it didn’t test fully autonomous vehicles on state roads in 2017.
The automaker keeps its autonomous driving test program more opaque as Tesla owners are frustrated by the delayed release of new Autopilot features.
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After the Tesla Autopilot came under scrutiny over the last two years following a fatal accident in a Model S while the vehicle was on Autopilot, the driver assist system seemed to have caught a break.
But now another accident has resulted in the launch of another investigation.
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There was a period of time over a year ago when accidents in Tesla vehicles were often blamed on Autopilot despite drivers being told that they are always responsible of their cars.
It appeared to have ended after more education about the driver assist system, but now a driver in California took it to an all new level.
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Speaking at a conference on artificial intelligence yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk updated his timeline prediction for a fully self-driving car to 2 years. He also predicts that another year after that cars will be significantly better drivers than humans.
Now it’s interesting to look into how Tesla’s self-driving effort plays into this prediction.
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Earlier this year, Tesla said that it was working with insurers in order for them to better understand features like the Autopilot.
Now, a major insurer announced that they are offering a 5 percent discount for drivers using Tesla’s driver assist system.
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On the consumer-facing side, we have seen some decent progress with the latest Autopilot 2.0 software updates recently, but Tesla is also adding capabilities in the background running on what has been known as “shadow mode.”
A recent look at the new capabilities in the background of Autopilot gives us a glimpse of what Tesla is working on.
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In its shareholder letter released yesterday, Tesla gave an interesting albeit vague update on its Autopilot program, but CEO Elon Musk also briefly mentioned the program in the following conference call with analysts.
He surprisingly hinted at an upcoming Tesla Autopilot hardware announcement.
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Along with its third quarter financial results, Tesla gave an update on two of its most well-known product programs: Model 3 and Autopilot.
The Model 3 production ramp has been delayed by roughly 3 months.
As for the Autopilot program, which has also seen its fair share of delays over the last year, it doesn’t get a clear updated timeline, but Tesla still hyped new functions coming in the ‘next several months’ and it elaborated on its work to further develop its autonomous driving system.
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Over the past few days, it looks like Tesla’s Autopilot has been under attack from several fronts by anyone from Apple’s co-founder Steve Wozniak to a billionaire investor shorting Tesla’s stock.
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Over the past two weeks, Tesla released two updates for its fleet of vehicles equipped with Autopilot 2.0 and Autopilot 2.5 hardware.
We are starting to see videos of the first test drives using the new updates and owners are noting some improvements.
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Active safety features are becoming increasingly popular as automakers are trying to leverage their development of autonomous driving into automated driver assist features.
Tesla’s Autopilot has been regarded as a leader in the space and now Edmunds releases evidence of that in a new report.
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Well, that was quick. Earlier this month, we reported that Tesla is adding automatic emergency braking to ‘Autopilot 2.5’ cars with a new update, but it was capped to 50 mph.
Tesla now started releasing a new software update to enable full speed automatic emergency braking for Autopilot 2.5 cars – along with other improvements.
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Tesla has been working on Autopilot 2.0 software for a year now almost to the day and some owners think that they have not shown enough progress. That’s why it wasn’t surprising to see the first question during a recent Q&A session with Tesla’s President of Sales and Service, Jon McNeill, being about Autopilot 2.0.
In his response, the executive cautiously addressed an upcoming update which he tested himself.
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As we previously reported, Tesla’s recently introduced a new Autopilot hardware suite, dubbed “2.5”, in all its vehicles to enable more power and redundancy for its future self-driving capability.
The new hardware has been under a ‘calibration period’, which resulted in those vehicles not having ‘automatic emergency braking’. Now we learn that Tesla started gradually rolling out the safety feature.
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A year ago, Tesla launched its second generation Autopilot hardware (Autopilot 2.0) and announced the ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ and ‘Fully Self-Driving Capability’ packages.
At this point, it’s no secret that Tesla has been late to release software updates for the features promised under those new Autopilot packages. Nonetheless, new data obtained by Electrek shows that an impressive number of Tesla owners have been buying the options.
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Nvidia is currently an important supplier for Tesla considering it powers everything from its infotainment system to its Autopilot computer.
After signs that Tesla is moving away from the chipmaker for its Autopilot system, now a report suggests Tesla is also looking elsewhere for its infotainment system.
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As expected yesterday following a report, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is partly blaming Tesla’s Autopilot system for the fatal, May 7, 2016, crash of a Tesla near Williston, Florida.
They determined that the Autopilot’s “operational limitations played a role” in the crash even though it “functioned as designed”, according to the board.
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Tomorrow, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) plans to release its report to “determine the probable cause of the fatal, May 7, 2016, crash of a Tesla near Williston, Florida”.
Ahead of the release, Bloomberg reported that that the board concluded that Tesla’s Autopilot “shares blame” for the accident that cost the life of the driver, Joshua Brown.
But the company argues against the publication’s interpretation.
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Tesla’s recently introduced new Autopilot hardware suite, dubbed “2.5”, in all its vehicles to enable more power and redundancy for its future self-driving capability.
Now Tesla warned the new owners of those vehicles being delivered that a ‘calibration period’ for the new hardware is resulting in features operating in “shadow mode”.
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Tesla’s vehicles are now all equipped with 8 cameras to power its Autopilot features and for a while now, some owners have been asking for the possibility to also use them as a dashcam.
CEO Elon Musk now says that the feature is “coming soon”.
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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.
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The Wall Street Journal came out today with a report (paywall) painting a dire picture of Tesla’s Autopilot program.
The publication claims that CEO Elon Musk’s ambitious goals for the program have led to some employees resignations and doubts about the company’s ability to deliver on those goals.
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Tesla started pushing its latest over-the-air Autopilot software update ‘2017.32’ for cars equipped with the second generation hardware last night.
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Tesla has been equipping all its vehicles produced since October 2016 with a “supercomputer” as part of its Autopilot 2.0 hardware to run its deep learning neural net computer vision technology, which the company believes will eventually enable fully self-driving capability through future software updates.
While it is likely the most powerful computer in a production car today, some had doubts about it being powerful enough or have enough redundancy to truly enable level 5 autonomous driving. Tesla CEO Elon Musk even said that they could eventually upgrade the system if it can’t achieve full autonomy.
That was less than a year ago and we now learn that the automaker is already shipping a new Autopilot hardware suite with a more powerful version of its onboard computer.
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