All New Tesla Electric Cars Will Come With Self-Driving Hardware
Elon Musk’s car company is determined to usher in an era of autonomous cars
All new models of Tesla electric cars will come with the components needed to turn them into fully autonomous vehicles with a software update at a later time.
“We are excited to announce that, as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver,” Elon musk’s car company said.
Accelerating driverless cars
The cars will come packed with eight surround cameras to provide a 360 degree view around the car at a range of 250 metres, twelve updated ultrasonic sensors to compliment the camera vision, and a forward-facing radar with what Tesla claims is enhanced processing capabilities to provide additional data about the cars surrounding environment and the route ahead and allow it to see through the car ahead and challenging conditions such as heavy rain, fog and dust.
“To make sense of all of this data, a new on board computer with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation runs the new Tesla-developed neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software,” said Tesla.
“Together, 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.”
The Tesla Model S and Model X cars currently in production have this hardware and are already on the market.
The hardware, when combined with Tesla’s autonomous driving software will enable cars to completely drive themselves without any input form a driver, though in the US the law currently states that a person must be behind the wheel.
But before Tesla activates the autonomous features it will be calibrating the system with tt vehicle carrying out millions of real-world driving miles. As this happened, the Autopilot feature found in some existing Tesla cars will lack certain features I the new cars. But as Tesla’s testing lead to them becoming robustly validates, they will be ennobled through over-the-air updates.
Despite hitting a few hurdles with its Autopilot system, Tesla appears to be bullish in bringing its autonomous driving vision to public roads ahead of other companies like Google, which seem to still be at the testing stages of their driverless car systems.
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