Tesla has poached an 11-year veteran of Apple, Chris Lattner, and installed him as the new vice president of Autopilot software, according to a post last night on Tesla’s blog. Lattner is, notably, the mind behind Apple’s “newest” programming language, Swift.
Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk had previously stated that an update allowing for Autopilot use in the new self-driving Hardware 2.0 vehicles (all Teslas produced since late October) would go out before the end of December. This goal seems to have been met … in a way. Tesla reportedly uploaded the new software to the first 1,000 vehicles last night. Assuming an earlier tweet from the Tesla CEO held true, that is. This is the tweet that I’m talking about:
I’m not going to attempt to identify which CleanTechnica stories of 2016 were my favorites, but below is a top 50 list of our 50 most popular articles in 2016 based purely on pageviews. After that, there’s a top 30 list for December (also purely based on pageviews).
Tesla has reportedly now gathered more than 1.3 billion miles of data from Autopilot-equipped vehicles, data that’s been obtained whether Autopilot was being actively used or not. What’s the value of all of this data? Does it give the company a significant advantage in the self-driving sector over its potential competitors?
This dashcam video shows how the latest version of Tesla Autopilot can navigate on a snow covered two lane road with no visible lane markings and no car ahead to follow.
In another example of why some industry spectators such as myself are as pro-self-driving-tech as we are, a new dashcam video has emerged showing Tesla’s Autopilot system saving a “driver” from a collision two vehicles ahead. The collisions wasn’t obvious to the human driver based on sight alone. This ability to detect … [continued]
Tesla’s Autopilot has historically allowed the driver to adjust the car’s speed to +/- 5 mph off of the posted speed limit. Apparently, though, that was recently modified and the driver could no longer do so.
In case you might have missed it, a few days ago Tesla Motors released a new video (featured below) with a Model X equipped with autopilot 2.0 navigating around an urban environment and finally ending up at Tesla headquarters. Most importantly, this video now shows what the new NVIDIA Drive PX 2 supercomputer is actually seeing. Obstacle, pedestrian, street signs and lights, and drivable surfaces are detected in real time.
A recent tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed that the v8.1 firmware update — which will presumably enable the new enhanced Autopilot features that are reliant on the new hardware suite — should roll out sometime around 3 weeks from now.
Starting October 19, every Tesla that comes off the assembly line at the Fremont, California, factory will be equipped with what the company calls its second-generation hardware package. The cars all have 8 cameras, 12 enhanced ultrasonic sensors, and a forward-looking radar. Tesla …
