Skip to main content

New Tesla models to have ‘full self-driving capability’

In its online blog, Tesla says that 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. The company has announced that from now, all Tesla vehicles produced in its factory, including Model 3, will have th
October 21, 2016 Read time: 2 mins
In its online blog, Tesla says that 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.

The company has announced that from now, all Tesla vehicles produced in its factory, including Model 3, will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level 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.

Before activating the features enabled by the new hardware, Tesla says it will further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving to ensure significant improvements to safety and convenience.

During this period, Tesla cars with new hardware will temporarily lack certain features currently available on cars with first-generation Autopilot hardware, including some standard safety features such as automatic emergency braking, collision warning, lane holding and active cruise control. As these features are robustly validated they will be enabled over the air, together with a rapidly expanding set of entirely new features.

Related Content

  • March 17, 2017
    Europe’s road safety gains have stagnated EU
    Europe will fail to meet its road death targets as enforcement budgets are slashed and drivers face an epidemic of distractions. The European Union will not achieve its aim of halving the number of people killed on its roads each year by 2020, delegates to Tispol’s (the organisation of European traffic police) annual conference in Manchester were told. “The target will be missed because there was only a 17% decrease in road fatalities across Europe between 2010 and 2015 when [the rate of reduction] should h
  • October 27, 2016
    The downside of driverless vehicles
    Driverless cars will have a detrimental effect on congestion and security while the road safety benefits can be achieved sooner and cheaper using ADAS, argues Colin Sowman. Many Governments are consulting about the introduction of driverless vehicles and even running trials. As 70% or 80% of crashes are caused by human error, the promise of a crash-free future of driverless, self-driving or autonomous vehicles (call them what you will) is alluring, as are the claims of reduced congestion and lower emissions
  • March 21, 2022
    The benefits of Lidar

    While Lidar is gaining ground in the ITS industry, it has not yet reached the level of mass adoption where it shows up frequently in requests for proposals (RFPs) from cities and DoTs.

  • June 2, 2015
    Self-driving car safety perspectives
    At yesterday’s Opening Plenary, Chris Urmson’s keynote speech dealt with the reality of driverless cars on our roads. By far and away their greatest benefit to mankind will be the potential to achieve an incredible saving of life and injury on the roads, as Urmson, director of the Google Self-Driving Car program, revealed to delegates. In response to an Associated Press article last month disclosing that self-driving cars have been involved in four accidents in the state of California, Urmson revealed th