Tesla Autopilot

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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NVIDIA’s Drive PX 2 is the onboard supercomputer that is installed in all-new Tesla vehicles since October 2016 and that powers the automaker’s second generation Autopilot with the ‘Tesla Vision’ image processing technology.

We had to take Tesla at their words that the high-tech piece of equipment was in the vehicle until now. An owner removed the panels of the new car and we got our first look at the system this week.
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Following the release of data from the first year of Tesla’s first generation Autopilot and the revelation that it reduced the crash rate of its vehicles by about 40%, Tesla CEO Elon Musk revealed that the Autopilot team aims for the second generation hardware to reduce the crash rate by 90%.
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As reported earlier today, NHTSA is closing its investigation of the fatal accident on Tesla Autopilot without finding any defect or issuing any recall. We now have access to the full report (embedded below) and there are some interesting key findings about the crash and Tesla’s Autopilot in general.

For example, the agency reviewed data that indicates Tesla’s crash rate was reduced by 40% after the Autopilot’s Autosteer feature was introduced.
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Update: NHTSA confirmed the news that the Autopilot was not at fault – Tesla’s crash rate was reduced by 40% after introduction of Autopilot based on data reviewed by NHTSA

Following the tragic death of 45-year-old Joshua Brown in a collision with a truck while using the Autopilot of his Tesla Model S in Florida back in May 2016, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched a preliminary evaluation of Tesla’s Autopilot and requested a lot of information from the automaker.

Citing a source briefed on the matter, Reuters reports that NHTSA is closing investigation today without finding any defect or issuing a recall.
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Earlier this month, Chris Lattner announced that he was leaving Apple to lead Tesla’s Autopilot software team after a decade at the Cupertino company where he led the development of the Swift programming language and developer tools.

There have been rumors about why he was leaving Apple, but the software engineer has now broken the silence to kill the rumors and disclose why he joined Tesla.
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Germany’s A1 Autobahn was the scene of a fatal 31-vehicle carambolage last weekend that resulted in the tragic death of a 73-year-old Tesla Model S driver and in injuries to 15 more people (6 serious and 9 minor injuries). In total, 26 cars, 3 semi trucks, and 2 large transport vans were involved, but the Model S grabbed the headlines since the death happened in the vehicle and some media quickly jumped at the possibility of Tesla’s Autopilot being the cause.
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After delaying the latest update that was supposed to come last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has now confirmed that the automaker started pushing the ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ update early this morning to the entire fleet of vehicles equipped with the second generation Autopilot hardware, but the update will only operate in shadow mode for now.
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Last month, Tesla started pushing a new update to make Autopilot follow the speed limit on the road more closely. The move, which restricted the Autopilot to the speed limit on roads and non-divided highways, angered some owners who claimed it rendered the system useless on those roads.

Tesla now started pushing a new update this week to partly roll back those restrictions.
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Today, Chris Lattner announced that he quit Apple after over a decade at the company where he developed the Swift programming language and worked on the Xcode and App store architecture.

Later in the day, Tesla confirmed that Lattner will be joining the automaker as Vice President of Autopilot Software.
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Last week, Tesla pushed the first phase of ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ to the first 1,000 vehicles and in shadow mode for the rest of the fleet. At the time, Tesla hoped to switch the rest of the fleet to active mode by the end of the week, but the company decided to push a new version of the update before going ahead.

CEO Elon Musk confirmed today that the new version will roll out tomorrow in active mode for the first 1,000 vehicles and in shadow mode for the rest of the fleet again. They are again aiming to switch the fleet to active mode by the end of the week.
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A picture of the instrument cluster of a Tesla Model S has been circulating on Tesla forums and Facebook groups following the company’s latest Autopilot update which brought the ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ feature to new cars with the second generation hardware.

After checking with Tesla, we can confirm that a vestigial version of the feature could have made its way in a build released to the first 1,000 cars with the new hardware this weekend, but it wasn’t intended to be in the latest customer build since the system still doesn’t act on the stop signs.
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Tesla didn’t want to start the new year on a bad note by missing a deadline with its Autopilot update for new cars to work is its ‘Tesla Vision’ image processing system and while it didn’t bring the system to parity with the last generation Autopilot, the company sort of kept its ‘December 2016’ goal for the release of ‘Enhanced Autopilot’, but it’s only what the automaker is calling the “first phase” of the new features.
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Yesterday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that Tesla was planning to start pushing its software update to start bringing Autopilot 2.0 cars to parity with the first generation Autopilot today and he sort of stayed true to the commitment. Tesla started pushing the update to the first 1,000 cars in its fleet, but it’s not exactly to parity with Tesla’s first generation Autopilot.
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Tesla has been aiming to release a software update to bring its new vehicles with Autopilot 2.0 hardware to feature parity with its last generation Autopilot in “December 2016”. Tesla owners with the new Autopilot hardware are anxious to get the features they were promised and CEO Elon Musk has been emphasizing that the company has been pushing to respect the deadline.

With a day left in December, Musk now says that it could come out tomorrow if Tesla can just fix a bug. Unfortunately, Musk also confirmed that its software update v8.1 will be pushed to “late January”.
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After recent snow storms in North America, some Tesla owners are experiencing the Autopilot in the snow for the first time and they are surprised that the Autosteer is able to keep steering despite not detecting any lane marking or even a lead vehicle.
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Just a few weeks ago, we published a report about how Tesla’s new radar technology for the Autopilot is already proving useful in some potentially dangerous situations. We now have a new piece of evidence that is so spectacularly clear that it’s worth updating that report.

The video of an accident on the highway in the Netherlands caught on the dashcam of a Tesla Model X shows the Autopilot’s forward collision warning predicting an accident before it could be detected by the driver.
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Back in October, we reported on Tesla reaching the 3 billion electric mile milestone and now the company’s global fleet has managed to add 500 million in less than 3 months – bringing the total to 3.5 billion. The company has been keeping track of its fleet mileage with a counter on the ‘Electric Road Trip‘ webpage.
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