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.
We reported earlier today on comments made by Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua about what is starting to look like an ugly breakup between the Israel-based maker of driver assistance systems and Tesla. He claimed that Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety” and that the company wasn’t comfortable with it.
But now Tesla is painting an entirely different picture of the reasons behind the end of the supply relationship. In doing so, Tesla confirmed its in-house ‘Tesla Vision’ product for computer vision and it depicted shady alleged business practices at Mobileye.
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After a very public breakup in July, Tesla CEO Elon Musk decided to refrain from commenting on his company’s relationship with Mobileye, Israel-based maker of collision detection and driver assistance systems and Tesla’s former partner in the development of Autopilot.
But on Wednesday, Mobileye’s chief technology officer, Amnon Shashua, didn’t shy away from commenting on the situation and opened up on what he says led to the end of the relationship.
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New reports are coming out of China today claiming that the first fatality in a Tesla Model S on Autopilot was not the widely-covered crash in Florida in May 2016 that resulted in the death of Joshua Brown, but actually an accident in China in January 2016.
The accident was under investigation for the first half of the year, but the family of the victim reportedly sued ‘Tesla China’ back in July and now details of the crash are coming to light in the Chinese media.
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Since Comma.ai came out of a very short stealth mode in December 2015, CEO George Hotz of iPhone and PlayStation hacking fame claimed that his new company would ship a product to retrofit cars for self-driving on the highway for less than $1,000 by the end of 2016.
At TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF Yesterday, Hotz mostly fulfilled his promise by unveiling ‘Comma One’, but not without some caveats.
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While I was completing a transcript of the conference call with Elon Musk on Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 of the automaker’s operating system, I realized that a very interesting quote by Musk went mostly unnoticed. Tesla’s CEO defended the company’s decision to push level 3 semi-autonomous system, a system under which the driver basically acts as the backup to the autonomous technology.
Several companies developing self-driving technology, like Google, Ford and Volvo, came out publicly against such a system citing safety concerns with the transfers of controls between the human drivers and the “robot driver”. Instead, they are advocating for a jump directly to level 4 full autonomy.
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Before anyone jumps to any conclusion, this is not a “Tesla Autopilot accident”. It’s a Tesla Model S hitting an Acura at an intersection. The Autopilot was not engaged and the Automatic Emergency Braking is believed to have kicked in though we can’t confirm it – more on that later.
What is interesting about this accident is that it confirms that Tesla’s Autopilot camera can be used to a certain degree as a dashcam to capture the circumstances of an accident.
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After the blog post yesterday and the press conference about Autopilot, some were disappointed that nothing was said about the next generation of the system. The event was focused on Tesla’s new radar processing technology and Elon Musk only answered questions about the update.
Nonetheless, I managed to ask Musk a question to help us have a better idea of the timing for the next generation hardware, often referred to as Autopilot 2.0, by looking at the limits of the current generation.
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The main new feature enabled by Tesla’s Autopilot update announced by Elon Musk yesterday is the ability to trigger emergency braking only through radar inputs coupled with fleet learning. Musk made it clear that the feature will work well especially with anything metallic or dense, but what about something big and fluffy like an animal?
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Tesla released its blog post about the Autopilot’s new radar processing capability today and CEO Elon Musk made himself available for a 1-hour long press conference during which he explained in more details the upgrade and took a few questions from reporters.
The talk was more technical than usual and Musk gave a few great examples for applications of the Autopilot’s new radar processing technology. And since it’s technical and going in details about the Autopilot systems, including a lot of details unannounced or unconfirmed until now, I think it’s worth making a transcript of his talk for future reference.
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One of the most impressive new features that Tesla announced today with the Autopilot’s new radar processing capacity is the ability for the system to see ahead of the car in front of you and basically track two cars ahead on the road.
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With the upcoming Autopilot improvements through radar processing in Tesla software v8.0 update, CEO Elon Musk sees a 3x potential increase in safety. Musk said that the data already suggests a 50% reduction in the probability of having an accident when using Autopilot versus manual driving, but the new radar processing technology could do much better over time with Tesla’s fleet learning capability.
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Tesla and Elon Musk released the much-anticipated blog post about Autopilot improvements under its upcoming v8.0 software update. They confirmed a few features we revealed over the last few months like disabling Autosteer after ignoring alerts and the capacity to take highway exit, but we also now have a lot more details about improvements to the radar processing technology of the Autopilot.
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This is part 7 and the last part of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A followed by part 4, part 5 and part 6.
Now here’s part 7:
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This is part 6 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A followed by part 4 and part 5.
Now here’s part 6:
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This is part 5 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A followed by part 4.
Now we are at part 5:
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This is part 4 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A. Now part 4:
Alex Roy – The Drive
Hello everyone how are you? Would have the improvements in Autopilot 8 mitigated or saved Josh Brown’s life?
Elon Musk – Tesla CEO
We believe it would have.
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This is part 3 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 and part 2 for Musk’s opening statement and part 3 is the first part of the Q&A:
Tim Stevens – Roadshow
Hi Elon, you mentioned the radar working well with signs and thing like that but mentioned perhaps something big and fluffy might be a challenge. Can you give me an idea of what that means for something like a moose, a deer or horses?
Elon Musk – Tesla CEO
Yeah it’s a good question. Actually, it should work for something like moose- because something like a moose is quite a big mass, but it may not work for say a small deer. A small deer probably would not trigger braking, but a moose I think would. I’m not 100% sure of that, but I think it would trigger on a moose.
We got a lot of customers in Canada and other places where there are moose-size creatures so I think we will get good information on that and obviously, you definitely want to brake for a moose because they are very big and it can cause a lot of harms.
I think it will (stop for a moose), but if not, I’m confident we can tune it to do so.
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This is part 2 of our transcript of Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update. You can read the part 1 here: Transcript: Elon Musk’s press conference about Tesla Autopilot under v8.0 update [Part 1]
Elon Musk – Tesla CEO:
Radar sees through rain, fog, snow, dust, and essentially quite easily. So even if you are driving down the road and the visibility was very low and there was a big multi-car pileup or something like that and you cant’ see it, the radar would and it would initiate braking in time to avoid your car being added to the multi-car pileup.
In fact, an additional level of sophistication – we are confident that we can use the radar to look beyond the car in front of you by bouncing the radar signal off the road and around the car. We are able to process that echo by using the unique signature of each radar pulse as well as the time of flight of the photon to determine that what we are seeing is in fact an echo in front of the car that’s in front of you. So even if there’s something that was obscured directly both in vision and radar, we can use the bounce effect of the radar to look in front of that car and still brake.
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Today, Elon Musk apologized for the delay in releasing his blog post about the updated Autopilot under v8.0 citing “unusually difficult couple of weeks”, presumably due to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 anomaly on September 1, but now he sets the date for tomorrow afternoon:
Will do some press Q&A on Autopilot post at 11am PDT tmrw and then publish at noon. Sorry about delay. Unusually difficult couple of weeks.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 10, 2016
The fact that he is holding a press conference before the release of the blog post is a good sign of the importance of the information that will be released.
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A Tesla Model S with manufacturer plates was spotted near Tesla’s Palo Alto headquarters yesterday. The vehicle had additional sensors mounted on the roof which is spurring speculation.
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While news outlets are quick to jump on the opportunity to report on accidents involving Tesla’s Autopilot system, the Autopilot helping prevent accidents is actually a more common occurrence and it doesn’t get nearly as much attention.
Of course, there’s no wreckage to grab the eye and therefore, it rarely reaches the media’s standard of sensationalism, but it helps when it is caught on a dashcam. After a near miss on the highway today in California, a Tesla Model S owner credited the Autopilot in helping avoid an accident.
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As we are still waiting for Elon Musk’s blog post about the updated capacity of the Autopilot with the upcoming v8.0 and v8.1 updates, we can get a glimpse of what the future generation of the Autopilot (not just software, but with hardware updates) will be able to do.
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The tragic death of 45-year-old Joshua Brown might go down in history as one of the most widely reported car accidents. And it’s not over. Brown died on May 7, 2016 in Florida, when his Tesla Model S on Autopilot went under the trailer of an 18-wheel semi and the roof of his car was torn off by the impact.
Following the crash, the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched a preliminary evaluation in Tesla’s Autopilot system. As part of the evaluation, NHTSA requested a lot of information from Tesla, which the company had to submit by August 26.
The deadline has passed, but NHTSA reportedly gave Tesla an extension.
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After the recent and widely covered series of Tesla accidents while on Autopilot, Tesla CEO Elon Musk talked about focusing on better educating Tesla owners on how to use Autopilot features. Last month, he mentioned an upcoming blog post to highlight “how Autopilot works as a safety system and what drivers are expected to do after they activate it.”
We have yet to see that blog post, but now Electrek has learned that Tesla will introduce new Autopilot safety restrictions in order to reduce the risk of similar accidents happening again. Tesla owners are often wary of new Autopilot restrictions. They feel like Tesla is rolling back features that they have paid for, but they shouldn’t worry about the new restrictions since they will not really affect owners using the system properly.
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