How Does Tesla's Autopilot Mode Work?

Recently, Tesla‘s taking things a whole level further as many of you would have heard. Tesla later released a software update for their late 2014 model S, and model X, Model 3 series Cars. I know it doesn’t sound like much of a big deal but it’s actually starting to turn into one. The thing that’s interesting and the main focus of this video is that the car is actually learned how to drive. Pretty much a breakthought in the automotive industry will get to the details of that breakthrough in a second but to get started, let’s see the system in action.

That’s pretty impressive, would you have reacted in time. Let’s just take another look at that. If the driver had at home being distracted, the result could have been very different.

So what in this update includes. The car cand do almost anything so we’re able to do lane keeping on freeways, to America cruise control, active emergency braking, self parking, so automatic parallel parking automatically going to horizon. You get home actually be able to just step out of the car and have park itself in your garage. Including it’ll open the door and it’ll go in and park itself. Going a step further, you will be able to summon the car. If you in a private property. You can actually some of the carnal, the car will come to wherever you are and it’ll use that ultrasonic sensors kind of like a insect antenna slowly make its way to you and then it stopped and be ready to go. Even a step beyond that which is if you have calendar turned on it’ll meet you there.

So how does the car land. It lands from humans of course. This is the real breakthrough. In a recent press conference Musk refer to each Model S as an expert trainer that feeds a collective AI network by simply just driving the vehicles on autopilot. In other words, each Tesla driver trains their car when they drive on autopilot mode. By doing this, they reinforced one to driving behavior in the car and discouraged unwanted driving behavior. But the interesting thing is that all Tesla a part of a flake so when one car land it teaches that all Tesla’s have a network, so they all learn together. It basically a hive mind of Tesla’s. It almost seems like the perfect combination of machine learning and autonomy. Really cool stuff!.

Since there are 10 of thousands of humans training the Tesla and all the Tesla learn together, that makes for a lot of instructional data. So all the Tesla should get very good at driving very quickly. Elon said that the system should improve everyday by updating the driving algorithm. He goes on to say that Model S could approximately 1 million miles of new data every day. It’s interesting to know that just a few weeks after the release Model S’s website member had been describing how autopilot is improving by itself.

Here’s one example, one guy tested autopilot on range road with aggressive curves which Tesla didn’t recommend but still as it turns out the system is learning how to handle shark moves pretty fast. The user with the name homicide sates that the first time you use the car to take a curve full speed, the car didn’t stand the land and issued the take control immediately alert. After a few times more on this curve with firm pressure on the steering wheel. The car learn to slow down first and then take the corner and today the car has no issue taking the curve. It’s definitely learning.

It’s fascinating stuff and It’s safe to day that was one thought to be science fiction is now a reality today.

Alright, let’s go deep part how exactly does it work. According to Elon, there are four for autonomous driving.

The first one is a long distance radar system that can see through virtually anything. This means sand, snow and other things that human eyes might not able to see through. The second enabling technology is cameras with image recognition software. The third – ultrasonic senses and the fourth is satellite imagery with real time traffic.

When these systems are all integrated, you get a very robust overall sysyem that almost acts like a digital extended safety cushion technology for your car.

So how electric car drive?

So before we wrap up the video, let’s hear it from Elon about new technology. This is him on the subject of legal implication of it on all autopilot.

“I think we’re gonna be quite clear with customers that the responsibilities remains with the driver. We’re not asserting that the car is capable of driving in the absence of drivers. That will be the case at some point the future like maybe five or six years from now. I think we’ll be able to achieve a true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at the destination. It is not there is one of 10 years, but the rate of improvement as I’m saying making I think we’ll probably 3 – 5, 6 years. But in order to do that, you have to have fully redundant systems. Every thing’s gonna be announced that anyone system breaking just not result in an accident and you also have to prove that out over millions of miles driving

So I know what if you are thinking what about hacking? “It’s not like a cell phone or laptop, you focus on making sure that they can take out order to spread of any kind of system wide hack”

Conclusion draw from this.

A lot of people say Tesla is drastically over valued and will vanish with the passing of the new tech bubble. But in my opinion, they really are showing a whole new way for an entire century old industry and I’d say even though it’s not easily measured, that is very very valuable. As Nobel economist Robert Shiller said: “technology has made the biggest changes in the economy. We just ought to take a look at GDP and the productivity numbers differently because they are not estimating all capturing the impact of new technology” Just to put that into Tesla as a whole is dying to progress in their relevant market. For example, I just had a look at Tesla shareholder meeting and are surprised to find out that Tesla is now the number one of high-end premium sedans in North America. Not only this but for 2015 the Tesla Model S in Switzerland has sold more than the sale of Mercedes S Class, BMW 6 Series and a Audi 7 combined. In addition to this, we can now travel anywhere in the USA using the supercharge. So all in all, it’s a great job done by Tesla team. They have repeatedly shown that how the electric car is the future and the latest effort to you by making the roads safer place. And I think that’s a good thing.