That’s the best deadline we have so far. Yesterday, Elon Musk said that Tesla Autopilot’s vision neural net is now “working well” but the system needs to gather “a lot” real-world data on the road to go through validation. It wasn’t clear how quickly Tesla could gather “a lot” of road data considering the company previously guided a release for “December 2016”, but Musk now says that they are aiming for “the end of next week”, which would be just on time.

Musk also confirmed that he is still “hoping” for the v8.1 update to be released next week and the update with the easter Egg to unleash more power in the Tesla P100D Ludicrous.

As usual, the CEO took to Twitter to make the announcement:

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

Musk mentioned that “most” of the features will be enabled, so not all.

Here’s the current list of the features that were available in vehicles with Autopilot 1, but not in Autopilot 2 at launch – with the ones that have already been pushed to new vehicles marked:

Auto windshield wipers

Auto low beam headlights

Auto high beam headlights

Auto-dimming touchscreen B instrument cluster

Parking assist

Blind spot detection

Forward collision warning

Auto emergency braking

Side collision warning

Side collision avoidance

Lane departure warning

Speed assist

Traffic-aware cruise control

Autosteer

Auto lane change

Autopark

Summon

Your guess about which ones is as good as mine, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the most safety-related like Autosteer and Auto emergency braking came after the first batch.

Once the update is released, Tesla will be able to gradually push the features mentioned above to bring the new system to parity with the last generation and start improving from there with the new Autosteer+, Smart Summon, and other new ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ features.

Of course, the goal is for the ‘Tesla Vision’ system powering the ‘Enhanced Autopilot’ features to one day enable fully self-driving capability. Musk thinks that day could come as soon as the end of 2017.

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