Aside from speeding up the world’s shift to a sustainable future, the American company said autonomous cars will also help improve transportation safety.
“Every car that Tesla produces from here on out will have the full autonomy capability,” said Elon Musk, co-founder and chief executive of Tesla, during a conference call with reporters.
All new Tesla vehicles, including the Model 3, Model S and Model X electric cars, will sport a full self-driving capability technology that will make “safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.”
All new Tesla cars will have full self-driving hardware paultan) October 20, 2016
The new self-driving technology includes eight cameras that provide 360 degree visibility up to 250 meters of range, 12 modern ultrasonic sensors that detect objects and a radar “capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead.”
“Self-driving vehicles will play a crucial role in improving transportation safety and accelerating the world’s transition to a sustainable future,” Tesla said in a statement.
“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.”
All the cars Tesla builds will have the necessary hardware to drive completely on their own. selfdrivingcars Rosenfeld (@rosenfeldj) October 20, 2016
The new Tesla car will also have a state-of-the-art computer that runs the “neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software.” This computer has 40 times the computing capability of the previous generation.
“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,” Tesla said.
Musk said the new hardware is “basically a super-computer in a car,” hoping that his company will someday be able to impress transport regulators with significant amount of “data showing the autonomous driving technology would avoid crashes and save lives.”
The new hardware package will cost $8,000 and Musk said the technology is still being tested, expecting that they would be able to run from Los Angeles to New York in full autonomous mode by the end of 2017.
However, the new hardware will temporarily be without collision warning, lane holding, automatic emergency braking and active cruise control – features that are currently available on Tesla’s first-generation Autopilot hardware.
These features are still being robustly validated and Tesla said it will “enable them over the air, together with a rapidly expanding set of entirely new features.”
