The new Autopilot system will lean more on radar to give the vehicle a better sense of what’s around it.
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A Tesla driver died earlier this year when the technology missed a lorry.
With the latest update, the system would have identified a “large metal object across the road”, Mr Musk said.
With the 8.0 update, radar will also track two cars ahead of you, instead of just the one directly in front of you, so that it can prevent your auto from crashing into a multi-car pileup or other obscured objects.
Away from radar, he also revealed that Teslas in Autopilot mode will need to be parked if repeated warnings to hold the steering wheel are ignored by the driver.
The use of more advanced signal processing to create a “picture of the world” through radar is the focus of the upgrade. The object detection abilities will be “superhuman”, Musk said. It was the first fatal crash involving a driverless system and prompted an investigation by the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration on all Tesla vehicles equipped with any version of the Autopilot system.
Previously, the Tesla Model S used a camera and image processing system as the vehicle’s primary sensors. Driver inattention is believed to have been a factor in the Florida Autopilot fatality. “We weren’t confident that we could resolve false positives where the radar would think that it should brake, but it shouldn’t”. Some went as far as calling Autopilot “an unsupervised wannabe”, but Musk was quick to point out that it is statistically safer than the average human driver – and has definitely saved a few lives as well. The company boosted functionality of the onboard radar already present in cars built after October 2014. Rather, they will now work in conjunction with the radar to provide a more-complete picture of the world around the auto.
Tesla finally published a long-promised blog post over the weekend detailing plans for its next major Autopilot update. This essentially bounces radar sensor readings off the road and underneath the vehicle in front and then back off objects ahead of that.
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The updated system will temporarily prevent drivers from using the system if they do not respond to three audible warnings to take back control of the vehicle.
