Tesla Autopilot

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has been hyping the release of the automaker’s version 9.0 software update, which is expected to include a bunch of improvements from small convenience features to new Autopilot features.

Now the automaker elaborated on those new Autopilot features, which will include the much-anticipated ‘On-ramp to Off-ramp’  feature.
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Tesla is finally ‘letting the cat out of the bag’ when it comes to its new custom-built chip for the next generation Autopilot.

The automaker claims that it now has the ‘world’s most advanced computer for autonomous driving’ that will be released in an upgrade to current owners next year.
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Accidents involving Tesla vehicles on Autopilot often get reported in the media, but we don’t hear a lot about the accidents that didn’t happen because of Autopilot since it’s not as exciting when virtually nothing happened – though it’s arguably just as important.

Now we have a good example with a Tesla Model 3 on Autopilot avoiding a crash in near-miss caught on a dashcam.
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Automakers and tech companies are rushing to bring autonomous driving systems to market and accumulating mileage with their test vehicles.

Tesla is taking a different approach by accumulating mileage with its customer fleet through its Autopilot driver assist program.

A new report now estimates that Tesla has accumulated over 1.2 billion miles on Autopilot and more than twice that when accounting for mileage in ‘shadow mode’.
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If you think some people drive like they are crazy in traffic today, it’s nothing like they do in the not-too-distant dystopian future of Mad Max.

Autonomous driving system might have an even tougher time to handle those fictional situations, but Tesla is actually somewhat addressing that with a ‘Mad Max’ mode in a development build of Autopilot.
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Following a comment from Elon Musk about changing the Autopilot’s ‘Hold Steering Wheel’ alert, Tesla has released a new software update to enable the change and it clarified how they detect the hands on the wheel.
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Tesla has recently been increasing the alerts to ‘hold the steering wheel’ when using Autopilot in an attempt to try to reduce misuse of the driver assist system.

The move is not welcomed by all Tesla drivers and could potentially lead to some of them seeking ways to avoid the alerts, which are often referred to as ‘nags’ in the Tesla community.

A product that helps them do just that was just shut down by NHTSA.
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We previously reported about what Tesla’s Autopilot can see with its suite of 8 cameras around the car, but we rarely got into how the Autopilot understands and interprets what it is looking at through its computer vision system.

That’s changing today after a few hackers were able to overlay Autopilot data on top of snapshots of what the system is seeing.
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As we reported earlier this week,Tesla’s latest Autopilot update comes with more ‘nag’ to make sure drivers keep their hands on the wheel, but some owners are complaining about their hands not being detected on the wheel even though they are gripping it.

CEO Elon Musk now says that Tesla will update Autopilot’s ‘Hold Steering Wheel’ to better reflect what needs to be done.
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The new Autopilot software update that Tesla started to roll out last week features some improvements in performance as promised by CEO Elon Musk. But now, owners are also finding out that Tesla significantly increased the “nag” to force drivers to keep their hands on the wheel.
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Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of AI and computer vision, is currently hard at work trying to improve Autopilot by training Tesla’s neural net with incredible amounts of data from Tesla’s fleet.

He took a break from it to give some interesting insights into the development at a conference last month.
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Tesla’s next major software update ‘version 9.0’ is now set for a release in August and it will include the first ‘full self-driving features’ for Autopilot 2.0 vehicles, says CEO Elon Musk
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Amid the controversy over the use of Tesla Autopilot and the few highly publicized accidents involving the driver assist system, a Tesla service technician has been filmed either asleep or unconscious at the wheel of a Model S driving on Autopilot.
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As Elon Musk announced earlier this week, Tesla started pushing a new Autopilot software update.

It features some performance improvements and it has a new feature that renders the surrounding car on the instrument cluster.
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During Tesla’s 2018 shareholder meeting yesterday, CEO Elon Musk teased a new Autopilot software update that could come as soon as this week and he talked a little about upcoming Enhanced Autopilot features.

He even confirmed that Tesla plans to bring back free Autopilot trials.
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Following all the recent news about crashes involving Tesla vehicles on Autopilot, music producer and Tesla owner Anton Zaslavski, better known by his stage name Zedd, decided to share a story that he thinks “shows the other side” of Autopilot, Tesla’s semi-autonomous driver assist system.
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Tesla had a few high-profile departures lately, but it is now making a high-profile hire of its own as it poaches Stuart Bowers, a former machine learning engineer at Facebook who most recently was VP of engineering for monetization at Snap.

Bowers will now become VP of Engineering at Tesla and work on Autopilot.
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There have been many shake-ups in the leadership of Tesla’s Autopilot as the autonomous driving space is getting increasingly competitive and companies are hunting for talent with experience in the field.

Sameer Qureshi is one of those engineers with experience since he has been “responsible for the entire Autopilot software stack across all of Tesla’s cars and platforms” for the past year and a half.

Now Electrek has learned that he left the automaker this month to join Lyft.
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A Tesla driver who recently crashed into a truck while on Autopilot got a citation from the police after Tesla released data logs and the driver admitted that she was looking at her phone during the accident.

Now the NHTSA is also announcing that it will investigate the accident, but only for data gathering as a “special crash.”
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New autonomous driver assist systems are coming to market using eye-tracking and other driver monitoring systems to make sure that drivers are paying attention to the road.

Tesla apparently looked into adding such a system to its Autopilot, but it chose not to because it found it to be ineffective, according to CEO Elon Musk.
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Several comments made by CEO Elon Musk since the launch of its Autopilot 2.0 hardware suite in all Tesla vehicles made since October 2016 indicate that the company might have to update its onboard computer in order to achieve the fully self-driving capability that it has been promising to customers.

Now it looks like Tesla might have to also offer computer retrofits for Autopilot 2.5 cars.
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