Tesla Releasing More Fully Self-Driving Features Later This Month
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has revealed that the company plans to release more self-driving features later this month. Unfortunately, he didn’t define what these new features would be, but we have a few ideas as to what they could involve.
Currently, Tesla has two buckets of autonomous driving options. One is Autopilot, which allows the car to match the speed of the cars surrounding it while also autosteering to maintain the car’s position in a lane. The second is a bit more interesting and is called Full Self-Driving.
This includes Smart Summon, auto parking, automatic lane changing, and navigation on Autopilot, which allows the car to make major decisions such as how to navigate an interchange.
The Tesla website lists two features that will be coming to this Full Self-Driving mode later this year:
- Recognize and respond to traffic lights and stop signs
- Automatic driving on city streets
Actually, these two new features were also shown as “coming later this year” last year, so are later than expected. With Musk’s latest reveal, we’re thinking these may be coming to cars later this month.
A Reverse Summon is also rumoured to be coming soon, where you can leave the car before it goes to find a parking space by itself. Tesla is still keen to remind owners what the definition of “Full Self-Driving” is:
“The currently enabled features require active driver supervision and do not make the vehicle autonomous. The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. As these self-driving features evolve, your car will be continuously upgraded through over-the-air software updates.”
Elon has mentioned that he’s also working on making sure the cars can be used to their full potentials in Europe, so we’ll be watching out for any updates coming soon.
