Months after a fatal accident that occurred while the driver had Tesla Motors’ Autopilot technology enabled, CEO Elon Musk says the company will release an upgraded version of the semi-autonomous feature. Within the next two weeks, customers who own Model S or Model X vehicles manufactured over the past two years will receive an over-the-air update of their vehicle software to install a more robust version of Autopilot, one that Musk said will deliver improvements in safety that could reduce crashes by more than 50 percent from their current rates.
?I think we?re making the Model S and Model X by far the safest cars on the road, not even close,? Musk said Sunday. ?I don?t think you?ll even see a car within a multiple. It?s really quite an announcement, and I wish we could have done it earlier, but perfect is the enemy of the good.? While its performance on the roadway remains to be seen, the announcement is meaningful in terms of how Autopilot functions. Before, the feature detected obstacles primarily by relying on cameras. Radar provided a backup role that essentially cross-checked information obtained from the camera, but it would not initiate braking based on its own information. That?s changing.
Now, camera and radar will have equal roles and responsibilities in object detection. Tesla Motors? engineers have worked the past three to four months to hone the radar information to a point it can be relied on to detect dense obstacles on the road ahead, whether t...