Tesla Cars Now Available With More Advanced Autopilot Hardware

Tesla – the only manufacturer that exclusively produces electric vehicle and which seems to spearhead the electric car industry – has fortified its future autonomous car plans. The American electric car giant has announced that all of its future cars will have every necessary hardware required to be fully autonomous. This applies to the India-bound Model 3 too, which is Tesla's smallest and cheapest car, and is due for launch in 2018. 

In Tesla’s latest press release, the company has claimed that the hardware used in the cars for the autonomous applications makes the car far more safer than if driven by a human driver. Surely a lot of work has gone into improving the Autopilot after the Model S crash fiasco. According to the release, Tesla cars will bestow eight cameras placed strategically on the body for 360-degree visibility, and with a range of an astounding 250 metres. The twelve ultrasonic sensors have now been updated and can detect and distinguish between solid and soft objects from double the distance compared to the previous system. Its forward-facing radar now makes use of redundant wavelength, which essentially gives the car the ability to bypass objects (such as a dust cloud, fog and even cars) ahead of it and attain a greater field of forward vision. 

The cars’ on-board computer has been juiced up to process the data provided by the above-mentioned hardware better. It can now compute more than 40 times in terms of volume than the previous one. 

Tesla also emphasises that with the radar eyes and in-house developed neural net of vision and sonar processing the car’s vision go far beyond human capability. The systems are available in Model S and Model X. 

However, the new system misses out on several standard features available currently with first-gen Autopilot hardware, namely, lane holding, emergency braking, and active cruise control. Tesla says that these systems need some validation before they are marked 'safe to use'. The features will be updated via a software update that will be made available soon to customers.