Tesla said the vehicle had failed to brake automatically because the system couldn’t distinguish between the white trailer and the bright sky. Mr. Musk said. Therefore, the bounce effect has been created to see ahead of a Tesla vehicle and still apply brakes, even if something can not sense by both radar and the vision.
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Musk declined to call the change a recall, saying it was merely a software upgrade.
Tesla Motors is making a change that it says could save lives. The accident has brought increased scrutiny by safety regulators of the system’s operation and the way it is marketed to Tesla buyers.
Musk says “fleet learning”, where Teslas report what they have encountered and how their driver responded to the company’s servers, will help improve every Tesla on the road. A fatal accident in May involving Tesla’s Autopilot system prompted a preliminary evaluation of Tesla’s Autopilot system by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
Now, in an effort to end such software problems, Tesla’s incoming Autopilot 8.0 software update will overhaul how its radar systems and camera work in detecting potential hazards for the vehicle and pedestrians nearby.
Tesla explained that “the net effect of this, combined with the fact that radar sees through most visual obscuration, is that the auto should nearly always hit the brakes correctly even if a UFO were to land on the freeway in zero visibility conditions”.
Mr. Musk has vigorously defended the Autopilot technology, saying it improves safety.
These sensors allowed the cars to operate in “autopilot mode” – steering and driving themselves (although the company has always stated that autopilot mode was a beta feature, and that humans should always remain in control).
It declined to provide an update on its Tesla investigation.
The advanced signal processing, which comes in the form of the radar, isn’t new to the Tesla Model S, as it had been added to all Tesla vehicles back in October of 2014.
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An over-the-air update will lean heavily on the car’s radar systems in order to give the electric cars a better sense of what is going on on the roads around them.
