Tesla Rolling Out Autopilot Software Updates to 1,000 Cars (bloomberg.com)

Tesla Motors began rolling out software updates to customers with newer cars, bringing them to parity with owners who have what's known as "Autopilot 1" and setting the stage to ultimately unleash full self-driving capability. From a report on Bloomberg:"HW2 Autopilot software uploading to 1,000 cars this eve. Will then hold to verify no field issues and upload to rest of fleet next week," Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said. When Musk announced in October that all vehicles now being produced at the Fremont, California, factory are shipping with a new hardware suite to enable full self-driving, he warned that the cars would temporarily lack some of the features currently available on Tesla vehicles with "first generation" Autopilot as the company validated the software. That includes some standard safety features like automatic emergency breaking, collision warning and active cruise control. Now customers with the âoeHardware 2â suite will have those features. .

Comments

Re:Breaking, or braking?

[TWX]

My biggest complaint is that security updates are now bungled with UI or functionality changes. I don't mean functionality additions, I mean where the way something behaves from the user point of view, a behavior that had no fault in it, is rewritten an the previous way is removed entirely, or where arbitrary changes are made solely for change's sake in order to attempt to demonstrate the newness of the new version.

I've gotten to the point where I would rather firewall-off of leave entirely offline a device or a system if I want its featureset to remain static. Learned that lesson with an Internet-connected Blu-Ray player that previously could access NPR "podcasts" but on receiving a firmware/software update had that feature removed.

This means I'm stuck with "Internet of Things" with vulnerabilities because if I patch those vulnerabilities I lose functionality, so I have to spend a lot of effort thinking about my network design (ie, VLAN my non-PC/non-Phone devices off from the rest of the network) and my firewalling rules (default to block-all and add whitelist exceptions, rather than attempting to blacklist) for those things that need only limited connections to the Internet for specific purposes. This is in addition to having to go through published IP range lists for countries to block essentially all IP ranges other than the United States, western Europe, and Japan...

Open Research Problem

[speedplane]

Self driving cars using just cameras and radar is still an open research problem. Even when using more advanced (and expensive) sensors like LIDAR, there are still a huge number of problems that are not solved. Either Tesla has a vastly better self-driving algorithm than every other University in the world, every other car manufacturer in the world, Google, AND Uber, or they are putting a half-baked product on the road.