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.
There are a lot of comings and goings in Tesla’s Autopilot team and that reached the highest level in leadership on several occasions. Again yesterday when Chris Lattner, VP of Autopilot Software, left and was replaced by an AI expert, Andrej Karpathy, and Jim Keller, VP of Autopilot Hardware (and now Software).
While several departures from the team made headlines recently, Lattner says that it grew by over 50% during his tenure as head of Autopilot software over the last 6 months.
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Yesterday, Tesla confirmed that it hired Andrej Karpathy as the new head of AI and Autopilot Vision. It’s a significant change for the young scientist who has been mostly focused on research and academics.
He will now have to deliver real-world applications – something that he commented on following the announcement.
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There were some significant changes to Tesla’s Autopilot leadership today.
Earlier this year, Tesla’s head of computer vision, David Nistér, left to make high-definition maps at Nvidia after Tesla hired the creator of the Swift programming language, Chris Lattner, from Apple to lead the Autopilot software team.
Just 6 months later, Lattner is no longer with Tesla and his responsibilities have been divided between Jim Keller, who was already the head of the Autopilot’s hardware team, and a new hire.
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Following a fatal accident in a Tesla Model S on Autopilot in May 2016, both the National Transportation Safety Board Office of Public Affairs (NTSB) and the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched investigations into the accident and Tesla’s Autopilot.
NHTSA closed its investigation earlier this year without finding any problem with the Autopilot that could have caused the crash, but NTSB’s investigation is still ongoing.
While they haven’t released the results of said investigation yet, they decided to release all the data that they have gathered since launching the investigation.
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Self-driving cars are now a software and big data problem. Most of Tesla’s competitors in the field are working on expanding their test fleets in order to gather more data. GM announced yesterday that it is adding 130 autonomous Chevy Bolt EV prototypes to its test fleet and Waymo recently deployed 500 self-driving Pacifica hybrid minivans in Phoenix.
Tesla is going a completely different *route* by using its large fleet of vehicles already in the hands of customers to gather data, which is especially significant with its vehicles equipped with second generation hardware.
Today, we’ve learned that the automaker’s latest policy change has enabled gathering videos from those vehicles which is really opening the floodgates of Autopilot data gathering.
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While the rollout of Tesla’s latest Autopilot 2.0 update has yet to go wide, some owners have reported getting the update early and they are now testing the new features for the first time.
We get our first look at the latest version of Autopilot 2.0 in a new video.
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After months of delays, it looks like Tesla is finally about to release some much-awaited software updates – and not only for cars equipped with second generation Autopilot hardware.
CEO Elon Musk updated the timelines for both the Linux kernel update, which has now an ETA for next weekend, while the new and improved web browser has been pushed to next month.
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Today, Tesla started the rollout of a new software update for its fleet of vehicles equipped with second generation Autopilot hardware.
The new update features what CEO Elon Musk called a ‘silky smooth’ new control algorithm for Autosteer, as well as automatic perpendicular parking and automatic display brightness adjustments.
Update: the software update also includes full speed Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), which was previously restricted to low-speed.
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Fortune Magazine had a worrying headline today ‘Tesla’s Self-Driving Tech Is a Danger to Cyclists, Robotics Expert Says‘.
At first glance, I thought it would be about Tesla’s autonomous driving demo since they called it ‘self-driving’, but no – it is about Tesla’s Autopilot, which is obviously not a self-driving system as it currently stands.
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In the past, we have extensively covered the fact that Tesla has been equipping all its vehicles produced since October 2016 with a very powerful computer in order to eventually enable fully self-driving capability.
While Nvidia confirmed that the computer in question is based on its Drive PX2 platform for autonomous driving, they offer several variations of the product and we never knew which one for sure until now.
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Tesla’s latest Autopilot updates for vehicles with the second generation hardware made several major improvements that virtually brought the system developed by Tesla to feature parity with the original system powered by Mobileye.
It now opens the door to start improving on the technology and take advantage of the much more advanced hardware suite.
Today, CEO Elon Musk started hyping an upcoming software update that will introduce a new control algorithm that he described as “smooth as silk”.
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Yesterday, we reported on a Tesla owner hacking into Autopilot’s debugging mode – giving insights into the back-end of Tesla’s semi-autonomous system.
Now another Tesla owner used data extracted from the hack to get a good view of what Tesla’s second generation Autopilot is seeing.
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At this point, 8 years after Google put a spotlight on self-driving technology, there are over 2 dozens somewhat serious companies with autonomous driving programs at different stages of development.
Tesla’s Autopilot is among the most well-known and arguably one of the most exciting since it’s already powering features in vehicles owned by customers. For better or worse, it lets people experiment with some aspect of it and through those experimentations, we now get a look at the Autopilot’s debugging mode – giving insights into the back-end of Tesla’s semi-autonomous system.
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Tesla started pushing its latest software update for vehicles with second generation Autopilot hardware this weekend. It removed the speed restrictions on Autosteer – bringing the feature to parity with Tesla’s first generation Autopilot on Mobileye’s technology.
Owners have started testing the new update with impressive results so far.
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Tesla is leveraging its large fleet of vehicles equipped with sensors in order to gather data for its autonomous driving vehicle program.
It’s now stepping up its data gathering game with the latest update this week by updating its data sharing policy to include collecting videos in order to ‘make self-driving a reality’.
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Friday night, Tesla started pushing yet another software update for its vehicles equipped with second generation Autopilot hardware (October 2016-present).
The new update removes the main restrictions on Autosteer, the Autopilot’s main autonomous feature, and made Tesla’s own proprietary vision system almost to feature parity with the first generation Autopilot powered by Mobileye.
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There has been a lot of changes in Tesla’s Autopilot leadership over the past few months and most of it can be linked back to former Autopilot program director Sterling Anderson leaving to form his own startup and Chris Lattner taking over the top role in the program, which happened in December 2016 and January 2017 respectively.
A few more senior Autopilot team members have since left, including the head of Tesla Vision, and we now learn that one of them is now leading an autonomous driving effort for Audi.
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We reported yesterday that Tesla was planning to start rolling out its automatic emergency braking feature on new Autopilot 2.0 vehicles by the end of the week, but we now learn that some Tesla owners are already receiving the update (8.1.17.11.45).
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With the release of its 8.1 software update last month, Tesla introduced the biggest update yet for its vehicles with second-generation Autopilot hardware (all cars since October 2016). They increased the speed limit for the Autosteer feature to 80 mph, implemented refinements to the traffic aware cruise control, and introduced the Summon feature – among other smaller improvements.
But the system still wasn’t at feature parity with the first generation Autopilot, primarily because of the lack of Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) feature. Electrek has now learned that the important feature is going to be released this week.
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Last month, we reported on Hagens Berman, one of the law firms leading a class action lawsuit against VW and Mercedes for the emissions-cheating software, attempting to start a class action against Tesla over the claims made for Autopilot 2.0 features: Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving capabilities.
They have now officially filed the class action led by 3 Tesla owners.
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Tesla’s former Autopilot program Director Sterling Anderson left the company in December to start his own self-driving startup, Aurora Innovation, with Chris Urmson, a founding member of Google’s self-driving project, which recently became Waymo. The departure from Tesla was less than amicable since the company filed a lawsuit against Anderson claiming that he stole proprietary information about Tesla’s Autopilot program and poached engineers who were reporting to him.
The lawsuit was settled today with Tesla withdrawing their allegations without damages and Aurora agreeing to make itself available for an audit by a third-party to make sure they don’t have proprietary information from Tesla’s Autopilot program.
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GM has been working on its own driver assist technology ‘Super Cruise’, which it presented as a competitor to Tesla’s Autopilot last year, for a while now. It was first supposed to launch in the 2016 version of the Cadillac CT6 two years ago, but after several delays, the company announced today that it will be available in the 2018 Cadillac CT6 later this year.
They release more information about the semi-autonomous driving system, which is almost presented as a level 3 autonomous driving system – something that is not available today in other vehicles (Tesla’s Autopilot is level 2).
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Yesterday, we posted pictures of the first sighting of a Tesla Model 3 release candidate in the wild. It seems to be the same prototype as the one in a video released by CEO Elon Musk last month, but the higher resolution of the new pictures from the sightings show more details and we can see new sensors.
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There are a lot of companies now working on autonomous driving technologies and as many approaches to achieve the ultimate goal of a safe fully self-driving system. With such a transformative technology, there will be an extraordinarily important first-mover advantage.
Navigant Research attempted to create a leaderboard based on each company’s vision and execution in order to get an idea of which ones might have a lead. It published the report this week with interesting results.
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