Behold The Future: Tesla Demonstrates Fully Self-Driving Capability

Monday, October 24, 2016

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completely-self-driving-tesla

If you’re an automotive enthusiast, enjoy the next five, maybe ten years. After that, we suspect insurance prices are going to start getting prohibitively expensive for anyone wishing to get around using meat-based drivers. Tesla, of course, is paving the way for such a future. They’ve recently announced that all Tesla cars, including the forthcoming, relatively-affordable Model 3, will come with the required hardware for full autonomous driving capability. And you just know that these cars will be considerably safer than your text-driving, drunk-driving, distracted-driving selves.

We are excited to announce that, as of today, all Tesla vehicles produced in our factory – including Model 3 – will have the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver. Eight surround cameras provide 360 degree visibility around the car at up to 250 meters of range. Twelve updated ultrasonic sensors complement this vision, allowing for detection of both hard and soft objects at nearly twice the distance of the prior system. A forward-facing radar with enhanced processing provides additional data about the world on a redundant wavelength, capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead.

To make sense of all of this data, a new onboard computer with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation runs the new Tesla-developed neural net for vision, sonar and radar processing software. 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.

Watch the video below to see what that future might look like. The driver in the video is only there for legal purposes, since our laws haven’t quite caught up with advances in technology. But make no mistake: they will. Despite the odd incident here and there, self-driving cars have already shown to be safer than humans and will be getting even safer as the tech is refined. So go ahead and enjoy what’s left of the era in which humans actually drove themselves.