In August, the next major software upgrade will be Autopilot 2.0,
said Tesla Motors executive director Ilon Musk. This will be the long-awaited version 9 (i.e., Autopilot 2.0 v9). The previous major update 8.0 took place in 2016.
The main feature of the upcoming update will be that
for the first time , the program will include features for fully automatic driving, that is, real autopilot. “Until now, Autopilot justifiably focused only on security,” Ilon Musk wrote in a
tweet . “From version 9, we are starting to activate autonomous driving.”
For legal reasons and for the sake of safety, Tesla is unlikely to allow these functions to be used for their intended purpose, that is, directly to drive a car in the absence of a man behind the wheel, experts
say . But the very fact that the program Autopilot, after so many years, finally becomes, in fact, an autopilot, is important - and begins to justify its name, which previously did not quite correspond to reality.
For the first time in the composition of the software, the
Full Self-Driving Capability options package appears, which will be gradually replenished. The new software is not cheap: the improved autopilot (Enhanced Autopilot) for cars running Autopilot 2.0 is offered for $ 5000, and the package
Full Self-Driving Capability - for $ 3000.
Last week, Musk also announced that the exit / check-out feature on the Highway junction (On-Ramp / Off-Ramp) for the Enhanced Autopilot will be released within a couple of months. This sought-after option will be a major improvement in autopilot. In this mode, the program will determine before decoupling which lane should be rebuilt and when. Before the congress, it will be reconstructed, slow down and give control to the driver On the highway, this function will also allow you to automatically rebuild the lanes depending on the speed of flow and the workload of each lane.
Test of the last Autopilot update in Model X on the "death curve" (isolation with a full loop)Last year, Ilon Musk announced that the autopilot functionality will soon be divided into Enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability packages. Since the program was updated late on schedule, this did not happen last year. But now it seems that everything is going to such a division.
This year, Tesla has already begun to make major improvements in Autopilot 2.0. In March, the neural network was completely replaced in the program: this is the biggest change since Tesla in June 2017
invited Andrey Karpaty, a well-known in-depth training specialist,
to work .
Meanwhile, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) published a
preliminary version of the accident
report , which happened on March 23, 2018 at about 9:27 am near the junction of US Highway 101 (US-101) and State Highway (SH-85) with involving the 2017 Tesla Model X P100D and several other cars.
The report states that the driver “engaged the strip holding and cruise control functions, which Tesla calls“ autopilot ”.” Shortly before the accident, the driver programmed the car to move at a speed of 120 km / h and removed his hands from the steering wheel. Approaching the interchange, Tesla at full speed entered the separation barrier, which is installed before the reduction of lanes on the road. This is a very dangerous place where accidents often occur. A 38-year-old driver, a software developer from Apple, died on the spot. According to the logs of the car he had 5 seconds and 150 meters to respond to the obstacle, but he did not.
NTSB experts ascertained the driver’s guilt and once again reproached Tesla for positioning its strip holding and cruise control functions as an “autopilot”, which encourages drivers to trust the car more than it deserves.
It remains to breathe with relief that during the recent
testing of the autopilot of “Yandex” in the loaded Moscow traffic there were no incidents.
From the Big Pirogov autopilot, the Toyota Prius under the nickname Teddy started off at a speed of just over 40 km / h, and at a racing ground in the outskirts, accelerated to 70 km / h.