Tesla Autopilot

As new owners of Tesla Model S and X equipped with the new Autopilot 2.0 hardware are growing impatient for not having the same convenience and safety features as owners of vehicles equipped with Tesla’s first generation Autopilot, CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to reassure everyone that the company is making progress.
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One of the main concerns people have about self-driving vehicles is how they perform in bad conditions, especially in the snow. Tesla is the first automaker to currently offer vehicles equipped with the sensors that the company claims will enable full self-driving and, therefore, it already had to find solutions to the problem.

It’s especially a problem with LiDAR, which is why Tesla used cameras and radar instead, but it also had to integrate defrosters on all its new cameras on the next generation Autopilot hardware. We take a look at the defrosters through recent videos of the new cars.
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With the release of Tesla’s version 8.0 software update in September, the automaker announced a new radar processing technology that was directly pushed over-the-air to all its vehicles equipped with the first generation Autopilot hardware. Tesla worked with its radar supplier, Bosch, to get upgraded drivers and access to raw input from the radar antenna on its Model S and X vehicles in order to build its own processing of the data.

It enabled Tesla to push new safety features and owners are already reporting that the system has helped them avoid accidents.
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Tesla promises that its new Autopilot hardware will enable all of its new vehicles to eventually reach level 5 autonomous driving capability, but in the meantime, they are lacking several features that have long been available in its cars equipped with the first generation Autopilot. Over the weekend, Tesla started pushing a new update to start adding those features, but new owners will have to wait a little longer for features most associated with Autopilot, like Autosteer or Traffic-aware cruise control.
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In order to circumvent the regulations imposed by NHTSA on his aftermarket driver assist device, the ‘comma one’, George ‘geohot’ Hotz announced that his startup is releasing a new version of the product, ‘comma neo’ (an anagram for one), for free as an open-source platform.

Hotz, who describes the capabilities of the system as only matched by Tesla’s Autopilot, says that NHTSA’s regulations only apply to products for sales and that way, comma.ai can still get its product out there and now focus on what was described as a “pivot” to helping other companies develop autonomous driving systems and get more data for fleet-learning to improve its own platform.
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If you take delivery of a Tesla Model S or X today with the automaker’s brand-new “self-driving-ready hardware”, it actually can’t drive itself just yet since Tesla is still working on the software, but it also doesn’t even have driver assist features on par with Tesla’s first generation of Autopilot.

That’s because Tesla is working on the new generation using its own ‘Tesla Vision’ image processing architecture, the company is rebuilding the features based on the new systems. New owners are quite impatient to try the new promised features of Tesla’s ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ and CEO Elon Musk has now clarified the expected rollout of those features.
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We reported earlier this year about the MIT launching a new study on driver interaction with Tesla Autopilot features. Lex Fridman, the postdoctoral Associate at the MIT Agelab responsible for the study, is presenting it as a way to provide big data to prove that advanced driver assist features, like the ones offered by the Tesla Autopilot, are safer than driving without them.

Fridman presented the ongoing study in more details during TMC Connect earlier this summer and the Tesla Motors Club released this weekend the presentation in full (embedded below). It’s worth a watch.
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Yesterday, Tesla released two very interesting videos of the latest version of its self-driving technology on the new Autopilot 2.0 hardware. While they are fascinating to watch, they were both sped up. I think it’s worth revisiting the test with the video slowed down to real-time in order to really appreciate the level of autonomy Tesla achieved so far.
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Back in September, Tesla pushed the v8.0 software update to its fleet of vehicles and it enabled some significant updates to the vehicles equipped with Autopilot hardware. A series of new tests show that the pedestrian detection under v8.0 is significantly better and now Tesla even renders humans in front of the car on the instrument cluster.
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As new vehicles are coming off the assembly in Fremont right now, Tesla is making the transition from its first generation Autopilot hardware to its second generation hardware in order to gradually enable level 3 and 4 autonomous driving, and eventually fully self-driving capability, according to the automaker.

As we discussed in the past, the industry is skeptical of Tesla’s ability to deliver a fully self-driving level 5 system with its new hardware suite, but there’s a reason Tesla is confident in its ability to deliver such a system. The reason is data.

Electrek has learned that Tesla has now accumulated 1.3 billion miles of Autopilot data from its first generation sensor suite and “nearly all of it” is useful to the second generation Autopilot, according to the company.
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Tesla is on the counter-offensive in Germany. After modifying its price structure to get access to the EV incentives in the country, now Tesla is responding to the critiques of the German road authorities about Tesla’s use of the word ‘Autopilot’ to describe its advanced driver assistance system (ADAS).
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Update: Another source at Tesla says that the new Inifibox is not for the Autopilot program, but another source says that the new Autopilot is increasing Tesla’s need for data storage

Tesla’s next generation Autopilot/self-driving hardware suite has a lot more sensors gathering data than its previous generation. And with now ~25,000 new vehicles per quarter contributing to its growing fleet and gathering even more data, the company needs a solid data storage infrastructure to support its fleet learning capability.

In an effort to do just that, Electrek has learned that Tesla recently invested in a new state-of-the-art data storage system to support its new Autopilot program and the significant amount data expected to be collected through it.
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Tesla Model S and X vehicles with the new Autopilot and self-driving capable hardware, also known as ‘Hardware 2’ or ‘HW2’, are starting to roll off the assembly line in Fremont since Tesla’s announcement last month. Now vehicles are being spotted with the new hardware suite in the wild.

Consequently, it gives us our first look at the new sensors outside of Tesla’s press content.
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There seems to be some confusion over the timeline of the rollout of the new ‘Enhanced Autopilot capabilities’ (Level 3/4) and ‘Fully Self-Driving’ (Level 5) capability of Tesla’s new hardware suite. I tried to gather everything we know into one post in order to get a clear picture of what the company is guiding in term of software updates on the new hardware suite.

Tesla believes that it figured out the hardware necessary to enable fully self-driving cars and that the technology is now a software problem. Therefore, the automaker is now pushing to solve the problem and doing so with the most aggressive timeline in the industry:
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While Tesla’s announcement yesterday has a ton of incredibly interesting implications for the near future of the company and whole industries really, and we will get into those today or by the end of the week, let’s start by looking into the “product update” itself which is the addition of new hardware in all of the new Teslas rolling off the line in Fremont as of earlier this week.
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When announcing Tesla’s new Autopilot hardware suite that will soon allow all Tesla vehicles to become fully autonomous, CEO Elon Musk went on an epic rant scolding the media about the coverage of Autopilot crashes.

It’s not the first time that Musk voiced is disappointment with the media about the international coverage that the few Autopilot crashes have received, but Musk went a step further this time.
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Tesla is really feeling the pressure on Autopilot from Germany. After the local media reported on excerpts of an alleged evaluation of the Tesla Autopilot by Germany’s Transport Ministry, which depicted a harsh critique of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) calling it a “significant traffic hazard”, the ministry sent a letter to all Tesla owners in the country last week to give them instructions on how to use the system.

Now we learn that the Federal Motor Transport Authority (KBA) is going one step further and it is now asking Tesla not to use the word ‘Autopilot’ when referring to its ADAS.
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Last week, we reported on excerpts of an alleged evaluation of the Tesla Autopilot by the Federal Highway Research Institute of Germany’s Transport Ministry. The excerpts showed a harsh critique of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) calling it a “significant traffic hazard”.

It created a lot of headlines in Germany where some publications reported that the Transport Minister could call for a ban on the Autopilot feature on German roads, but today we learn that the report resulted in a simple yet unusual letter to Tesla owners in Germany.
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Tesla is using its fleet of vehicles owned by its customers to collect data through its Autopilot sensors and build high-precision maps and other features to improve its advanced driver assistance system (ADAS). With its latest OS update, version 8.0, the option to share the data with Tesla is automatically turned off for owners in Europe, presumably due to local privacy laws.
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Speculation has been running wild since Elon Musk hyped an “unexpected” upcoming product unveiling set for Monday, October 17. Details are scarce and no one at Tesla wants to confirm what will be part of the event next week.

Since you guys got it exactly right the last time with a strong majority, we thought it would be appropriate to come to you again to crowdsource an educated guess on the upcoming product unveiling.
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It’s arguable, of course, but third-party tests have shown Tesla Autopilot outperforming other semi-autonomous or advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) from Mercedes, Hyundai and Cadillac by a wide margin.  That, and the fact that Tesla is gaining more real world data in its vehicles than anyone else would seem to indicate Tesla is a leader in the field, if not the leader.

Now we learn that Tesla could be about to significantly increase its lead with ‘Tesla Vision’. Electrek has learned more details about the new program, which is an end-to-end computer vision system built with NVIDIA’s CUDA, a parallel computing platform by the graphics processing unit (GPU) maker.
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