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.
On Friday, we published an update on what is now being called the “Montana Tesla Autopilot Crash”. Our report featured a new public letter from the Model X owner involved in the accident, known as Mr. Pang, in which he claimed that Tesla didn’t contact him after the fact and was “covering up” the accident by quickly putting the blame on him.
At the time, we asked Tesla to comment on the new allegations, but the company referred to its previous statement on the accident. Today, the automaker decided to respond directly in its own public letter to Mr. Pang in order to address the situation.
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Via John Stoll at WSJ, Mark Rosekind , the head administrator of NHTSA, stated last week at a conference in Detroit that the auto industry and the utilization of Tesla’s Autopilot “can’t wait until it’s perfect.”
In the past few weeks, three accidents involving Tesla vehicles on Autopilot made the headlines. Tesla was quick to place the blame with the drivers for two of the accidents, one in Pennsylvania and one in Montana, both involving brand new Model X SUVs.
In both cases, the automaker says that the vehicle logs show that drivers ignored several alerts to take control of the vehicles before the accidents. In both cases, the drivers were also cited by the police for careless driving – giving some weight to Tesla’s claims, but now the driver of the Model X in the Montana crash is coming back with a public letter to Tesla and Elon Musk claiming a “cover-up” of the problems with the Autopilot.
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The Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) of Tesla’s Autopilot reportedly saved the life or prevented serious injury of a pedestrian in Washington DC last week. The event was reported to Tesla by a Model S owner and the automaker confirmed the event through the vehicle logs, according to Elon Musk.
You can find the full transcript of the email below:
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Since we first reported on Tesla’s v8.0 software update being tested in beta, the company has been pushing a few new versions prior to the wide release in order to refine the improvements – primarily to the Autopilot – but a recent comment by CEO Elon Musk raises an interesting question.
V8 will be our biggest release since v1, so taking longer to refine. Awesome on every level. Meeting w design team every day.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 17, 2016
It’s a bold statement. We spoke to a few people who tested both v7.0 and v8.0. They mostly agree that v7.0 was a significantly bigger update to Tesla’s OS than the upcoming v8.0, but there could be more to it than what Tesla released in beta to testers.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been working on the second part of his ‘Master Plan’ for the past two weeks and he is now a little late. While flying back to California after spending the past few days in Florida for a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch, the CEO said that he will be focusing on the Tesla Model 3 and Autopilot today, consequently pushing the ‘Master Plan’ again:
Will be working at Tesla on Autopilot & Model 3 today, then aiming to pull an all-nighter and complete the master product plan
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 19, 2016
It’s the tenth anniversary of the debut of the Roadster today. Some hoped it would coincide with the release of the plan, which Musk hoped to publish last week, but it looks like it will be pushed to at least tomorrow.
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New Tesla Model X owners are reporting receiving their vehicles with a dual front-facing camera housing instead of one for only a single camera. The same housing has been spotted in the Model X before, but what is particularly interesting here is that it could be the first time that it was delivered with the second side exposed.
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The limits of the Autopilot under its current suite of sensors have been debated for a while, especially since Tesla has been discussing an upcoming second-generation hardware for the program to allow fully autonomous driving.
But last night, Elon Musk announced that “certainly moderate and maybe big advances” are possible with Tesla’s current sensors.
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Earlier this week, Germany’s Federal Office for Motor Vehicles (KBA) made Tesla owners nervous in Europe after it said that it wouldn’t approve a feature on the roads if it is described as ‘Beta’ following the debate over the use of the word to describe Tesla’s Autopilot features.
But Tesla gained European approval for the Autopilot system in the Netherlands, not in Germany, and the authority in the country is now saying that “no safety concerns” were found in the system, but they will be following the NHTSA evaluation in the US.
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In the now all too familiar and tragic event that occurred on May 7th, 2016, involving one of Ohio’s biggest ‘Teslavangelist’, we now have the official letter (via Reddit) sent to Tesla last Friday, the 8th, from the Office of Defects Investigation (ODI), part of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). You can read it in full below.
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Earlier this week, we reported on an accident involving a Tesla Model X on Autopilot over the weekend. The vehicle reportedly veered off road and hit a guardrail made of large wooden posts. The impact destroyed the passenger side of the Model X and detached the front wheel, but fortunately, both occupants were not injured.
Following the accident, the driver claimed that the Autopilot veered off road on its own, but Tesla has now issued a statement regarding the accident and claims that the data log shows that the driver didn’t respond to an alert to hold the steering wheel, which they say led to the accident.
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Over the weekend, Tesla CEO Elon Musk clarified the automaker’s use of the word ‘Beta’ in reference to the Autopilot system after Germany’s Federal Office for Motor Vehicles (KBA) said that it wouldn’t approve a feature on German roads if it is described as ‘Beta’. The agency said that the ‘beta-phase’ could mean ‘an incomplete status of the software’.
Elon Musk claimed that the word “beta” is not used in the “standard sense” of the word, but to make sure drivers “don’t get comfortable” with the system.
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Update: Tesla Model X rollover accident in PA: Tesla says ‘no data to suggest that Autopilot was engaged’
Just a few days after the first fatality in a Model S accident while the Tesla Autopilot was activated came to light, we now learn of another severe Tesla crash while the vehicle was allegedly on Autopilot, but this time with a Model X and fortunately everyone survived.
The crashed happened last Friday (July 1) on the Pennsylvania Turnpike near the Bedford exit, about 107 miles east of Pittsburgh. The Model X hit a guard rail and then the concrete median before rolling over and coming to a rest in the middle lane. The driver, Albert Scaglione, told the police that the Autopilot was activated at the time of the accident.
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Following the news of the fatal accident in a Tesla Model S on Autopilot, which happened in May but only came to light last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claims that about half of the approximately one million people who died in auto accidents last year would have been saved if the Tesla Autopilot was universally available.
He made the comment in a somewhat strange email conversation with a retired journalist.
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In a development regarding the fatal accident in Florida where a Tesla Model S on Autopilot crashed into the trailer of a truck last month, the truck driver in question, Frank Baressi, now claims that the Tesla driver was watching a movie while traveling on the highway using the Autopilot.
The accident happened last month in Florida, but it came to light only yesterday when it was announced that the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) launched a preliminary evaluation into Tesla to make sure the Autopilot worked according to expectations.
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One of Tesla’s main advantages over other automakers is its capacity to send significant software updates over-the-air. Model S and X owners wake up in the morning and ta-da! They have new features in a vehicle they bought weeks, months or even years go, and Tesla’s next update will have something for everyone, whether you have Autopilot hardware in your car or even if you own a ‘classic’ pre-Autopilot Model S.
Electrek has learned all of the so far unreleased details of Tesla’s upcoming update 8.0 — one of its biggest to date. The automaker started testing the latest build with a limited number of owners and it features the most important UI refresh since the launch of the Model S, new Autopilot features and more…
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Update: Tesla sent us a statement regarding the tests discussed in this article. You can see it in full below.
The Tesla Autopilot program can be confusing at times since it englobes a lot of different features like Traffic Aware Cruise Control (TACC), Autosteer, Autopark, Auto Emergency Braking (AEB) and others. While you can look into Tesla’s public literature on the features, like release notes and manuals, it is fairly limited.
There’s nothing better than some actual testing of the features to explore the limits of the program. A couple of Model S owners got together and did just that – though we wouldn’t necessarily recommend using their methods since jumping in front of a moving car is rarely a good idea.
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The story of a Tesla Model S crashing into the back of a trailer while the ‘summon’ feature of the Autopilot was activated has been making the headlines since last week. Tesla placed the blame with the driver, but now the automaker pushes an update to its fleet to add a step to the Summon feature that could potentially have prevented the accident.
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When Tesla first introduced the Autopilot in October 2014, it announced that every car from now on would be equipped with the Autopilot hardware suite which consists of a forward-looking camera, radar and 360° ultrasonic sensors. Tesla has since been pushing updates to enable new features to the cars equipped with the system.
Of course, existing Tesla owners asked if a retrofit would be available for their vehicles. Tesla was quick to suppress any hope that a retrofit would be made available citing a workload too important to make a retrofit cost-effective versus simply trading up for a Model S equipped with Autopilot hardware.
Now a Tesla hacker proved the automaker’s point by himself retrofitting a classic Model P85 with new and salvaged Autopilot parts and sensors, and actually making it work.
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Self-driving cars are expected to facilitate the life of a lot of people with disabilities, like the visually impaired, but also some elderly people who often face restrictions when driving after a certain age.
Of course, it will require a period of adaptation as evidenced by this 70 years old woman’s first experience with the Tesla Autopilot caught on video.
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A new report published today by Israel’s Globes suggests that Elon Musk visited Israel-based tech firm Mobileye to test a new system for the next generation Tesla Autopilot.
According to Globes, Musk visited Mobileye’s Israel operations earlier this month for a “demonstration of several breakthrough developments by Mobileye in [automated driving technology] installed on a trial Tesla Model S vehicle.”
The report suggests that Mobileye is testing its automated driving technology in two Tesla Model S test vehicles. Independently, a Model S being tested with a fully-autonomous hardware suite was recently spotted in California.
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