Updated Tesla Autopilot Release Confirmed For December

Tesla announced a couple of months ago that an updated Autopilot system will be rolled out to further improve its cars’ semi-autonomous driving functionality. The semi-autonomous system will rely more on the radar after the update as it believes to have solved many of the issues that limited the radar’s role to that of a supplementary sensor ever since it was integrated into Tesla cars back in 2014. The company’s co-founder and CEO Elon Musk has revealed today that the updated Tesla Autopilot is going to be released starting next month.

Musk was responding to a tweet from a Model S customer who got a unit with the new Autopilot hardware. He asked when version 8.1 of the software which promises all of these enhanced semi-autonomous driving features will be out. Musk responded by saying that the update will be out in about three weeks and that “it will get rolled out incrementally in monthly releases.”

Features include enhanced Autosteer which now takes in data from new external cameras, Smart Summon, and more. The monthly releases are part of Tesla’s vision to achieve full autonomy by the end of next year.

That’s an ambitious target but Tesla appears to be committed to meeting it. Tesla owners now have to wait for a couple of weeks before they get a part of the new Autopilot experience on their expensive all-electric cars.

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@edwardsanchez about three weeks and it will get rolled out incrementally in monthly releases

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2016

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Transportation
Tags: Autopilot, elon musk, Tesla