Tesla CEO Elon Musk Teases Full Self-Driving Features #ElonTweets
Tesla CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter again recently to share the first look at Tesla’s highly anticipated Full Self-Driving feature. The image shares a satellite map of the Bay Area behind a new options screen that shows off a few of the new Full Self-Driving options within Autopilot.
Elon shared his perspective in another tweet that autonomous driving was relatively easy to build, as it will always yield to other vehicles on the road. The new image confirms his perspective that fine tuning a fully autonomous solution largely depends on how aggressive the driver wants the system to be, noting that it “will prob have a manual override that requires continuous press for hardcore lane changes.”
This shows up in the form of the “Blind Spot Threshold” setting with Standard, Aggressive, and Mad Max options. With safety as a core focus of Tesla’s Autopilot solution, giving users the option to make the system more aggressive seems to be in direct opposition to that core directive, but we’ll have to wait to see how it acts in production before making a call on that.
Buttons for “Follow NAV” and “Blinker to Fork” and “Enable ULC” hint at the flexibility of the solution and imply additional configuration options for users in the Full Self-Driving solution.
The Augmented Vision tab hints at a heads-up display (HUD) or similar functionality that will overlay helpful driving features like lane lines, navigation instructions, and safety alerts over the road ahead. This can be done by projecting images onto the windshield or by overlaying them onto a video of the road. With Tesla’s historical focus on intuitive, functional user interfaces, it will be interesting to see what this feature actually does and how Tesla rolls it out in August.
Other notable additions are the inclusion of the “Clip Recording” option that seems to deliver on the dashcam feature that many drivers have asked for over the years. If the car has so many cameras built into it, why not use them to passively record user-accessible security footage instead of having to purchase an aftermarket dashcam? Elon confirmed that this was a feature Tesla was looking to add in August’s Version 9.0 of the Autopilot solution.
Sharing the screenshot of what is clearly the developer version of the Autopilot solution is surely aimed at firming up Tesla’s leadership in autonomous driving technology with those who have invested in the solution over the last few years, while also encouraging more current drivers to opt into Full Self-Driving ahead of its first features arriving in August.
Elon previously shared that Tesla was planning to roll out the first production version of Autopilot, dubbed version 9, with Full Self-Driving features in August. Full Self-Driving has been a $3,000 build option for Model S, Model X, and now the Model 3 for several years, but no features have been moved into the production build of Autopilot to date.
I’m currently waiting for the standard battery for the Model 3 before we pull the trigger on one of our reservations, and the possibility of having another exciting feature unveiled before then is an enticing prospect. Have you already pulled the trigger on your Model 3 or are you still waiting for that one feature? Let us know in the comments what your ideal build looks like and if this update changes your timing.
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