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.
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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A month after starting to push the first phase of ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ to the first 1,000 vehicles and a few weeks after releasing it to the whole fleet, Tesla has now started pushing a new update to improve on the new Autopilot.
Owners of Tesla vehicles with the second generation Autopilot hardware started receiving the update v8.0.17.5.28 over the weekend.
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While Tesla has now thousands of vehicles equipped with its latest Autopilot hardware on the road today, only a few prototypes in its captive fleet have a software build capable of level 4 or 5 self-driving installed.
In its latest Disengagement of Autonomous Mode report with the California DMV, the automaker confirmed that it operated 4 of those prototypes last year and that they accumulated 550 autonomous miles in 2016.
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As we reported yesterday, Tesla is suing its former Director of Autopilot programs, Sterling Anderson. The company claims that he allegedly poached Tesla employees and stole confidential information in order to start a competing company with Chris Urmson, the former head of Google’s self-driving program.
Anderson denies the allegations, but regardless of what happened, Tesla made a bold claim about the motive behind launching his new company and in the process, they took a solid swipe at GM and Uber.
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The departure of Autopilot program Director Sterling Anderson from Tesla last month wasn’t widely reported since it was disclosed only earlier this month when Tesla hired Chris Lattner as Vice President of Autopilot Software.
We now learn that Anderson left the company to start his own with Chris Urmson, the former head of Google’s self-driving program. Unfortunately, we are learning of this new company through a lawsuit since Tesla is claiming that the Anderson stole data from the Autopilot program and tried to poach employees before leaving.
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Since Tesla started pushing the update to introduce the first phase of Enhanced Autopilot to the rest of its fleet equipped with the second generation hardware (first 1,000 already had it), we have received several bug reports.
One of the most common bugs, and also the most bizarre, results in inconsistent displays of the vehicle renders and road lanes on the instrument cluster.
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Tesla’s software timeline to fully autonomous driving on its new Autopilot hardware can be somewhat complicated. There’s ‘Enhanced Autopilot’, which in itself offers several different features, and there’s ‘Full Self-Driving Capability’, which despite its name will not enable self-driving for a while, but could still be useful to Tesla drivers very soon.
CEO Elon Musk clarified the timeline last night.
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After Tesla started pushing the first phase of the new ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ in shadow mode-only to the entire fleet earlier this week, the company is today starting to activate the feature to all cars equipped with the second generation Autopilot hardware.
But CEO Elon Musk is asking Tesla owners to be cautious because some cars will need adjustments.
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