Real-life Tony Stark aka Elon Musk has a present just in time for the holidays, hinting of a possible roll-out for Tesla’s autopilot before 2017 begins. The enigmatic CEO tweeted on December 22 that “(Tesla) might be ready to rollout most of Autopilot functionality for HW2 towards the end of next week”, referring to the HW2 hardware installed on new Tesla vehicles since October. The new autopilot feature promises a full self-driving capability which were not available during initial launch. As expected, it required a lot of tweaking and calibration in order to be street legal and applicable to real-world driving scenarios and be validated.
Looks like we might be ready to rollout most of Autopilot functionality for HW2 towards the end of next week
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 23, 2016
Elon Musk did not delve into specifics of which of Tesla’s autopilot features will be ready which include automatic emergency braking, collision warning, lane holding and active cruise control. What is known however is that the Tesla Autopilot vision neural net is working. Although fans were disappointed that these were not readily available at launch several months ago, it is an understandable necessity considering the safety requirements. Musk himself has been critical of the media’s scepticism of autonomous driving and has pointed out time and time again that it is much safer than any other alternative.
