Once again
our readers guessed it right (well 40% of you). You said that today’s announcement would be about Autopilot 2.0/Tesla Vision and you were right. Though Tesla seems to be moving away from the name ‘Autopilot’, the company announced tonight its second generation autonomous driving hardware and confirmed that it is in all vehicle off the assembly line right now.
CEO Elon Musk said that will enable full level 5 autonomy.
Tesla significantly changed its hardware suite from what it was previouslyo working on – with now fewer radar antennas and instead, a focus on cameras to take advantage of its new ‘Tesla Vision’ product.
It basically skipped the Autopilot 2.0 level 4 version hardware suite that it was planning and jumped to 360 camera coverage for level 5 autonomy.
The picture above is what the system can see now with the new sensor and hardware suite:
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- 8 cameras – 3 front-facing
- 40x more powerful onboard computer – Nvidia GPU Titan
Musk highlighted the integration of the new sensors saying that you can barely see the difference between the old and new suite despite having 7 more cameras.
We are currently in a press conference call with Tesla CEO Elon Musk who is now taking questions about the announcement. We will be sharing what we learn from the call as soon as possible. Stay tuned and keep refreshing the post.
Here’s Tesla’s full blog post about the announcement:
All Tesla Vehicles Being Produced Now Have Full Self-Driving Hardware
Self-driving vehicles will play a crucial role in improving transportation safety and accelerating the world’s transition to a sustainable future. Full autonomy 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.
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. Eight surround cameras provide 360 degree visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range. Twelve updated ultrasonic sensors complement this vision, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the prior system. A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides
additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength, capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead.
To make sense of all of this data, a new onboard 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. 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.
Model S and Model X vehicles with this new hardware are already in production, and customers can purchase one today: https://www.tesla.com/autopilot
Before activating the features enabled by the new hardware, we will further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving to ensure significant improvements to safety and convenience. While this is occurring, Teslas with new hardware will temporarily lack certain features currently available on Teslas with first-generation Autopilot hardware, including some standard safety features such as automatic emergency breaking, collision warning, lane holding and active cruise control. As these features are robustly validated we will enable them over-the-air, together with a rapidly expanding set of entirely new features. As always, our over-the-air software updates will keep customers at the forefront of technology and continue to make every Tesla, including those equipped with first-generation Autopilot and earlier cars, more capable over time.