Tesla

Tesla says that all the cars it produces will now be capable of driving completely autonomously.

A video released on Thursday shows a demo of a car driving itself – with a human in the seat “only there for legal reasons”. The car appear to pull out of a garage before a man gets in. The vehicle then sets off, the steering wheel moving while the driver’s hands remain hovering just above it. The car navigates streets, stopping at stop signs and braking when a pedestrian steps in front of it in a car park. The video ends with the car pulling off a manoeuvre tricky to many human drivers: parallel parking.

The video – which is admittedly rather stylised – follows Tesla’s announcement on Wednesday that all cars produced in its factories from now will be equipped with “the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver”.


This includes eight cameras that give a 360 degree view around the car with a range of up to 250 metres, radar (particularly useful for when visibility is poor) and a new onboard computer, which the company claims has 40 times the computing power of its previous model and runs a “Tesla-developed neural net” to process the data collected by the sensors. Full autonomy is a step up from the current “Autopilot” feature in Tesla cars.

Elon Musk, co-founder and CEO of Tesla Motors, revealed more details on Twitter. He says the video shows the car’s ability to read parking signs, as it avoids a disabled space. “When searching for parking, the car reads the signs to see if it is allowed to park there, which is why it skipped the disabled spot,” he says.

He suggests drivers will communicate with their car via an app. “When you want your car to return, tap Summon on your phone. It will eventually find you even if you are on the other side of the country,” he says.

While the Model S and Model X with the new hardware are already in production, we won’t see empty cars driving around just yet. The company still needs to validate the software, and says it will “further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving” before activating the new features. The system will also have to be approved by regulators before it is able to take to the roads.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Tesla plans to demonstrate a car driving across the US in full-autonomous mode by the end of 2017.