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.
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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Earlier today, the German magazine Der Spiegel published excerpts from a new internal report on the Tesla Autopilot by the Federal Highway Research Institute of Germany’s Transport Ministry. The excerpts show a harsh critique of Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) and go as far as calling it a “erhebliche Verkehrsgefährdung”, which directly translates to a “significant traffic hazard”.
Interestingly, the main problem with the Ministry’s analysis appears to be that they are benchmarking the Autopilot as a self-driving system – something it is not. Tesla has now issued a thorough response to the report in an attempt to clear the air.
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The controversy over how to approach Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) continues as the California DMV is moving forward with a new regulation to ban the use of certain words in the promotion and advertising of the systems.
One of the words is ‘Autopilot’, which is exactly what Tesla has been calling its own ADAS since its announcement in October 2014.
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Several German media outlets are reporting this morning on an accident involving a Tesla Model S and a bus on the Autobahn in northern Germany. According to the reports, the Model S was changing lanes using the Autopilot feature and crashed into a bus.
The 50-year-old driver was reportedly “slightly injured” in the accident, but all passengers on the bus were unhurt.
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As promised by Elon Musk last week, Tesla started rolling out the update last night and now we get every single detail of what the automaker is describing as “the biggest update since the introduction of the Model S”.
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Tesla v8.0 software update with upgraded Autopilot features has started being pushed to owners last night. The update includes a lot of unanimously welcomed upgrades, like the new radar processing technology, voice command improvements, and upgraded navigation and media apps with the UI overhaul.
But it also includes new Autopilot ‘nags’ and restrictions, taking the form of alerts and warnings, which are dividing Tesla owners. Some see new restriction as Tesla rolling back features that they already bought and a few go as far as refusing to update, while others welcome the new restrictions as a way to make the system safer.
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The conversation around Tesla’s upcoming v8.0 software update has revolved around the improved Autopilot, and rightfully so with the new radar processing technology to be introduced with it. But for many the biggest change will be the entire UI overhaul.
Today we take our first exclusive look at the new UI ahead of the wide release of v8.0, which is expected to be pushed to Model S and X owners later this week, thanks to new pictures from an anonymous source.
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The saga of the breakup between Tesla and Mobileye just keeps getting messier. After the comments made by Mobileye CTO Amnon Shashua claiming that Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety”, Tesla issued a scathing response alleging that Mobileye used some questionable methods to force Tesla to use their system for future generations of the Autopilot.
Today, Mobileye responded to the allegations, partly refuting them, and again reiterating that they initiated the end of the partnership because they disagreed with Tesla on their approach to safety with the Autopilot.
But the statement is surprisingly not trying to refute some of Tesla’s most serious allegations.
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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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