Most noteworthy is that the use of the radar system, which was added to all Tesla (TSLA) vehicles in 2014 to play a supplementary role, will be significantly increased.
Advertisement
– Tesla announced Sunday, September 11 that its upcoming Autopilot 8.0 update will rely more on radar than previous versions of the semi-autonomous feature. In addition, by bouncing radar signals underneath the vehicle ahead, a Tesla will be able to see an additional car-length in front of itself – giving it a better chance of anticipating oncoming road hazards, said chief executive Elon Musk.
Currently, Tesla vehicles primarily use cameras to scan the road ahead, but with Autopilot 8.0, the electric vehicles will lean more on radar technology to move about safely.
Autopilot was launched by Tesla last October, to allow drivers to hand over some responsibility for controlling its cars to the cars themselves.
Tesla’s head Elon Musk mentioned that improvements in the company’s Autopilot technology could have prevented the accident on May7 in Ohio. Ideal safety is really an impossible goal. Brown’s death was the first known death of a driver using such a system, which uses cameras, radar and sensors to steer vehicles and set their speed.
During a drive, a series of radar snapshots – taken during every tenth of a second – will create a 3D picture of the surrounding world based on several frames improving accuracy rather than just taking a single frame.
The new Autopilot system will lean more on radar to give the vehicle a better sense of what’s around it.
According to Tesla boss Elon Musk, with this updated autopilot the accidents caused by the vehicles can be cut down my nearly half. Moving forward, radar will take the role of primary control sensor, something the company calls a major change – and challenge.
Tesla claims that the features help the auto prevent hazards and reduce the driver’s workload.
“When the data shows that false braking events would be rare, the auto will begin mild braking using radar, even if the camera doesn’t notice the object ahead”.
Advertisement
During an online press conference about the software update, Musk said: “It’s not going from bad to good, it’s going from good to great”.
