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Tesla Autopilot


Tesla Autopilot is a driver assist feature offered by Tesla. The company's stated intent is to offer fully autonomous driving at a future time, acknowledging that legal, regulatory and technical hurdles must be overcome to achieve this goal. In the middle of 2017, Teslas plans were to demonstrate full self-driving by the end of 2017 and to enable it in 2019.

Autopilot was first offered on October 9, 2014, for Tesla Model S, followed by the Model X upon its release. Autopilot was part of a US$2,500 "Tech Package" option. At that time Autopilot features included semi-autonomous drive and parking capabilities. Initial versions of Autopilot were developed in partnership with the Israeli company Mobileye. Tesla and Mobileye ended their partnership in July 2016.

In mid October, 2015, Tesla rolled out software package version 7.0 with Autopilot to US customers. In December 2015, Tesla announced that it will remove some self-driving features to discourage customers from engaging in risky behavior. Autopilot Firmware 7.1 made those changes and includes remote parking technology known as Summon that can park and "unpark" without the driver in the car.

On August 31, 2016, Elon Musk announced Autopilot Firmware 8.0, that processes radar signals to create a coarse point cloud similar to Lidar to help navigate in low visibility conditions, and even to 'see' in front of the car ahead. Autopilot, as of version 8, uses radar as the primary sensor instead of the camera. In November 2016, Autopilot 8.0 was updated to have a more noticeable signal that it is engaged and it requires drivers to touch the steering wheel more frequently, otherwise Autopilot will turn off. By November 2016, Autopilot had operated actively on hardware version 1 vehicles for 300 million miles (500 million km) and 1.3 billion miles (2 billion km) in shadow mode.

As of October 2016, all Tesla vehicles come with the necessary sensing and computing hardware, known has "Hardware 2", for future fully autonomous operation (SAE Level 5), with software being made available as it matures. The company offers various free/extra-cost options for enabling Autopilot-associated features/services. Autopilot on Tesla hardware version 1 cars cost US$2,500 ($3,000 after delivery) and for hardware version 2 cars Autopilot costs $3,000 ($3,500 after delivery) with "Enhanced Autopilot" costing $5,000 ($6,000 after delivery).


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