This afternoon Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a press conference to explain the Autopilot features included in the update v7.0, which the company will start releasing tomorrow to Model S owners.

If you have been following our coverage of the beta Autopilot, you have a good idea of the capabilities of the system, but Musk revealed a few more details and explained Tesla’s approach to the release. expand full story

In our series of exclusive articles about Tesla’s beta Autopilot and v7.0 software update, we described in details its capabilities and functions, but we couldn’t publish any pictures or videos of the systems in action in order to protect our sources.

But as the wide release of the update is getting closer, we found a video (via TMC) of a Model S owner apparently from China running v7.0 with Autopilot and testing the system with Autosteer and TACC on the highway. expand full story

This is part 2 of my report on the beta version of Tesla’s Autopilot. Please read part 1 if you haven’t yet. 

Most advanced commercially available autonomous features

The language about the responsibility around the ‘Autopilot’ is somewhat straight-forward. The system is clearly not intended to turn the Model S into a self-driving vehicle with a bunch of redundant autonomous features, but it’s rather an evolutionary step toward self-driving. It alleviates some tasks for the driver, but without ever taking any responsibility.

Tesla uses very clear legal language throughout the beta release to place all the responsibilities with the driver. The driver can and should take over control if he or she thinks it’s necessary. expand full story

In mid-August Tesla sent out the first release of its beta v7.0 software update to early access testers all around the U.S. and parts of Europe. This particular update is an extremely anticipated one, not just because of the UI design overhaul, but because it includes several new ‘Autopilot’ features, which some Model S owners have been waiting for close to a year now.

We wrote a first look at the update when the release came out and we followed-up with Tesla’s second release of the beta v7.0 earlier this month.  Now this weekend I had the opportunity to fly out and have a complete (unofficial) walk-through of the new update and more importantly, I got to experience the new ‘Autopilot’ features. expand full story