Tesla Autopilot

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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A misleading article titled ‘The customer is always wrong: Tesla lets out self-driving car data – when it suits‘ in the Guardian today sparked criticism over Tesla’s policy about releasing Autopilot data following a few crashes where the drivers blamed Tesla’s driver assist system. I say that it’s misleading because the author, Sam Thielman, claims that we are talking about “self-driving” vehicles, which is obviously not the case.

The only “self-driving data” that Tesla ever released was through the California DMV’s disengagement report for just over 500 miles driven by a test fleet in California last year.

What he is instead talking about are the logs that Tesla has sometimes released in the media after drivers have claimed that some of the company’s Autopilot features have caused crashes. Thielman asserts that Tesla conveniently only releases the data when it serves them – hence the “customer is always wrong” comment.
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While Tesla’s Autopilot is very much a driver assist system and not a ‘self-driving car’ as it is often reported in the mainstream media, its ‘Summon’ feature is probably the closest thing to “self-driving” today.

It has been available for first generation Autopilot cars since January 2016, but the new 8.1 update brought the feature to second generation Autopilot cars last week and it is now being tested by owners.
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There have been some significant comings and goings in Tesla’s Autopilot leadership over the past few months. Most significantly, Tesla hired the creator of the Swift programming language, Chris Lattner, from Apple to lead the Autopilot software team. It enabled Jinnah Hosein, SpaceX’s Vice President of Software and who had been filling the position, to get back to his regular job. Sterling Anderson, Tesla’s Autopilot program director, also left the company to start his own self-driving startup and he was subsequently sued by Tesla over his hiring of a few colleagues.

Now we learn of Tesla’s Vice President of Autopilot Vision, David Nistér, leaving the Autopilot leadership team for Nvidia.
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Tesla’s 8.1 software update released this week is the most significant step for the Autopilot program on the new hardware. Chris Lattner, Tesla’s Vice President of Autopilot software, said so himself:

8.1 is the biggest update yet for Autopilot HW2 cars: https://t.co/xwCWdpWJnv

— Chris Lattner (@clattner_llvm) March 29, 2017

Indeed, it’s the biggest jump for the speed limit, but Electrek has also learned that Tesla is now making a better use of its hardware. With the 8.1 update, Tesla is now using 2 cameras instead of just the one out of the 8 cameras on the sensor suite.
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Last week, Elon Musk said that Tesla’s highly anticipated 8.1 update was coming March 28-29 and he delivered this time. We reviewed reports of the update 8.1 (17.11.3) being rolled out to Tesla owners with Autopilot 2.0 hardware.

The 8.1 software update was also supposed to bring some UI improvements, but so far the release notes focus on bringing the Autopilot 2.0 system to parity with the first generation.
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Accidents involving Tesla vehicles have often been blamed on the Autopilot lately. The latest example happened in Phoenix last week when a Model X hit a police motorcycle. Fortunately, no one was hurt.

The police said that the driver blamed the Autopilot.
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Before introducing the second generation Autopilot hardware, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that once the first truly self-driving car is available, all other vehicles without the technology will have a “negative value”.

Echoing the idea, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said this week that they started warning their clients that if Tesla is successful in enabling fully self-driving capability on its current vehicles equipped with the second generation Autopilot hardware, it could render all other cars obsolete.
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When looking at the picture above, you would think that it’s the aftermath of a fatal accident, but the Tesla Model X driver actually walked out of it with “no injuries aside from a stiff neck”. He credited the vehicle’s safety for saving his life, but he also blamed the Autopilot for what he claims was “driving full speed into the back of a semi”.

It’s actually a little more complicated than that.
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Hagens Berman, one of the law firms leading a class action lawsuit against VW and Mercedes for the emissions-cheating software, is 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 wrongly claim that Tesla marketed the vehicle has “Full Self-Driving” and that those claims “now appear to be false.”
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As Tesla is reportedly close to finishing its Autopilot 2.0 update that will remove the speed restrictions and bring the system to parity with the first generation, we get a good look at the latest version of Autopilot on the new hardware suite through a 30-minute drive by a Model S owner.
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A startup insurance company called ‘Root’ is using a mobile app to track its customers’ driving habits in order to offer discounts based on performance.

They took noticed of Tesla’s crash rate being reduced by 40% after the introduction of Autopilot based on data reviewed by NHTSA and they now want to offer discounts to Tesla drivers.
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Tesla started pushing a new update to its fleet of vehicles equipped with the second generation Autopilot hardware suite tonight. The update increases the speed limits on the Autopilot’s two main features, but it’s still not to parity with the company’s first generation Autopilot.
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If you think that the rivalry between George ‘geohot’ Hotz’s small autonomous driving startup comma.ai and Tesla is only in the hacker’s head, you might be wrong.

The hacker tried to buy a Model S last week and while Tesla didn’t outright stop him from buying the car as he made it sound on Twitter, the automaker indeed made him reconsider the purchase after an awkward call with Tesla’s legal counsel.
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There has been some frustration from Tesla owners around the transition from the first generation Autopilot to the second generation. Lately, people have been sharing the failings of the first few iterations of the Autosteer feature under the new system (see below).

It might be a good opportunity to remind everyone that the feature is still very much in “beta”, more so with the second generation than the first, and that it should be used with caution. We even learned that Tesla is currently utilizing only 1 out 8 cameras on the new hardware suite, which goes to show how the system is currently not representative of its potential.
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In its continuous effort to bring its second generation Autopilot to parity with its first generation of the driver assist system, Tesla has started pushing yet another update to vehicles equipped with the new Autopilot hardware.

The company is now introducing ‘Autopark for parallel parking’ on ‘Enhanced Autopilot’.
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There have been a lot of changes recently to Tesla’s Autopilot and it’s sometimes hard to keep track – especially since it has been split between first generation Autopilot (AP1) and second generation Autopilot (AP2) or ‘Enhanced Autopilot’.

The features of the second generation are still catching up to the first under the new hardware suite and software architecture using ‘Tesla Vision’. The latest change has been pushed to the first AP2 cars today and it enables Autosteer on ‘local roads’, but with a few restrictions.
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The publication of Tesla’s disengagement report for its self-driving tests in California last week has raised more questions about the program than it has answered. Some are surprised that Tesla is not more extensively testing its fully self-driving software.

Tesla had 4 self-driving Model X prototypes driving just over 500 autonomous miles on public roads in 2016. As we reported based on sources, the mileage was mainly for producing video demonstrations of what they can do with the new hardware suite. Tesla has now confirmed the information and it hints at further testing outside of California public roads to reassure those disappointed by the report. 
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