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Tesla's Autopilot To Get 'Full Self-Driving Feature' In August (reuters.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the full-autonomous dept.

Earlier today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted that its Autopilot driver assistance system will get full self-driving features following a software upgrade in August. Reuters reports: Autopilot, a form of advanced cruise control, handles some driving tasks and warns those behind the wheel they are always responsible for the vehicle's safe operation. But a spate of recent crashes has brought the system under regulatory scrutiny. "To date, Autopilot resources have rightly focused entirely on safety. With V9, we will begin to enable full self-driving features," Musk tweeted here on Sunday, replying to a Twitter user.

Musk said the autopilot issue during lane-merging is better in the current software and will be fully fixed in the August update. However, it was not clear what self-driving features would be included in the August update. Tesla's documentation on its website about the "full self-driving capabilities" package says that it is not possible to know exactly when each element of the functionality will be available, as this is highly dependent on local regulatory approval.

3 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Re: have you ever driven in a Tesla? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Jokes aside, the tesla interior is much closer in quality and style to a civic than a Mercedes.

  2. Some partial feature, not full self driving by misnohmer · · Score: 3, Informative

    Since 2016, anyone who paid Tesla for FSD got absolutely nothing over those who didn't. What feature will get rolled out in August is not publicly known, could be some trick the car can do that it couldn't before (e.g. warn you if it sees a stop sign or a red light, not guaranteed it will see one of course). Then again, given that Elon said the exact same thing in the past, "features rolling out starting December 2016", then "FSD coast-to-coast demo by end of 2017", and none of them came remotely true, I would not be holding my breath. Could be just a way to distract the media from NHTSA investigation results, or other news Elon wasn't thrilled to see.

    1. Re:Some partial feature, not full self driving by misnohmer · · Score: 4, Informative

      That actually is is a much bigger problem, and Google/Waymo and other researcher have concluded there is no safe way to implement a self driving car if humans have to supervise it and be able to take over in a split second (as per Tesla's fine print) when it does something wrong, such as try to kill you by driving into a concrete median:
      Robot Cars Can’t Count on Us in an Emergency https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...

      Elon got it wrong, self driving is a separate problem and you can't get there incrementally by increasing the level of autonomy (think wanting to go to the moon - going farther and farther by car will never get you there):
      People who paid Tesla $3,000 for full self-driving might be out of luck https://arstechnica.com/cars/2...