Tesla has announced that all its future electric vehicles will be equipped with the company’s new-generation full self-driving hardware (dubbed Autopilot 2.0), a move that reinforces its intent to introduce fully autonomous cars to the market.
The company claims the new tech will enable a Tesla “to be substantially safer than a human driver, lower the financial cost of transportation for those who own a car and provide low-cost on-demand mobility for those who do not.”
According to a statement on the company’s website, the Model S, Model X, and upcoming Model 3, will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability. This includes eight surround cameras (three front-facing) providing 360 degree visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range.
Supplementing the car’s “vision” are twelve updated ultrasonic sensors, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the previous system. A forward-facing radar with enhanced software provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength, capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead.
An Nvidia GPU Titan supercomputer handles the processing of all the data from the sensors, with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation system. Tesla says this system “provides a view of the world that a driver alone cannot access, seeing in every direction simultaneously and on wavelengths that go far beyond the human senses.”
However, the new tech does come with a catch, as the hardware suite will temporarily not offer Autopilot capabilities (including some standard safety features such as automatic emergency braking, collision warning, lane holding, and active cruise control) as those found with the previous hardware.
This is because the company wants to further calibrate the system using “millions of miles of real-world driving” to ensure significant improvements of safety. Once these features are validated, cars with the new hardware will receive over-the-air software updates that will unlock them for use.
Current Teslas with the previous-gen system will still receive parallel updates but will not be able to match the abilities of the cars made from today. The new hardware is expected to provide Teslas with greater levels of autonomy than before, which by the end of next year, could see Teslas offer up to Level 5 autonomy (following the United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s guidelines).
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If you try to use autonomous driving tech as your selling point to lure high-end customers, you are wrong; we trust human drivers.
Intermediate buyers who are tech-addicts or females may like this.
I guess you would definitely love the buyers to sign an S & P to protect you should anything goes wrong (similar to legal consent).
Insurance companies, what is your stance?
Exclusion criterias. The ‘s’ is purposefully put there.
Mandatory maintainance issuess, broadly.
Autonomous driving won’t work lah. Especially in Malaysia. Look at our moto, they all beat traffic lights.
Even when polis at traffic lights also, they will beat the lights infront of the polis officer.
However sophisticated software you have or radar detection you have, it cannot work in some countries.
Skynet has claimed its first few victims alredi, yang lain bila lagi?
these technologies are developing. If you close down the doors how are they suppose to improve the system.. Geezzz technology needs time to mature. Like it or not, that is the market trend. If you want to follow suit, join the ride if not just stay aside. This goes same as google, facebook, smartphones etc. few years ago.