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Tesla Autopilot update is late, but testing is 'working well'

Originally promised for mid-December, enhanced Autopilot will get here when it's ready.

Dec 22nd 2016 at 10:06AM

Autopilot Full Self-Driving Hardware (Neighborhood Long) from Tesla Motors on Vimeo.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has already made promises to new Tesla owners that their Autopilot updates are coming soon, saying that his teams are working seven days a week to get things ready. The issue here is that all of the updated sensors and software in new Model S and Model X electric vehicles are not all turned on for recent buyers, making them currently less capable than older vehicles that don't have the latest vision software, but do have things like auto emergency braking, traffic-aware cruise control, and lane departure warning.

For Enhanced Autopilot to work, it needs the new Tesla vision "neural net," which uses eight surround cameras, 12 updated ultrasonic sensors, and forward-facing radar to see and understand the world around it. Meshing all of these inputs is the challenge for the updated Autopilot system. Musk Tweeted that things are working, but need more real-world testing:

You can see a version of what a new Tesla, one equipped with all this new tech, sees in this video. Musk had promised that Autopilot 8.1 would arrive in the middle of December, but that deadline has passed and Musk apparently wants to get it all right before sending it out to the masses.

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