Tesla Rolling Out Autopilot Software Updates to 1,000 Cars (bloomberg.com) 67
Tesla Motors began rolling out software updates to customers with newer cars, bringing them to parity with owners who have what's known as "Autopilot 1" and setting the stage to ultimately unleash full self-driving capability. From a report on Bloomberg:"HW2 Autopilot software uploading to 1,000 cars this eve. Will then hold to verify no field issues and upload to rest of fleet next week," Tesla Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk said. When Musk announced in October that all vehicles now being produced at the Fremont, California, factory are shipping with a new hardware suite to enable full self-driving, he warned that the cars would temporarily lack some of the features currently available on Tesla vehicles with "first generation" Autopilot as the company validated the software. That includes some standard safety features like automatic emergency breaking, collision warning and active cruise control. Now customers with the âoeHardware 2â suite will have those features.
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Dammit, Elon! (Score:2)
If you had rolled this out just a couple of days earlier I could have gotten as drunk as I wanted on New Years Eve without this drunk driving charge!
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For non-electric cars that have autopilot built in, I wonder if your car can get pulled over for drunk driving if you let autopilot drive and your fuel has too much ethanol in it.
Marketing Stunt (Score:4, Insightful)
Simply because there aren't any jurisdictions which will allow autonomous driving anytime in the future.
I don't think there's even a full qual/cert process which will allow autonomous vehicles in any jurisdiction/let alone something like the entire United States.
But, it does keep Mr. Musk's name in the news in a positive light (and overshadows what's going on at SpaceX).
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What's going on at SpaceX?
Re: Marketing Stunt (Score:1)
The usual. Pissing away money
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Unlike the Russians [spaceflightnow.com] or the [nasaspaceflight.com] Chinese [spaceflightinsider.com].
BTW, SpaceX is planning their next launch on sunday jan 8.
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BTW, SpaceX is planning their next launch on sunday jan 8
Thanks. Was wondering when that would happen considering they were supposed to start up again in November
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Oh, yes, NASA rockets never burn up on the launch pad, do they [spaceanswers.com]?
Rockets are dangerous, both before and after launch. That's just a fact of life. If any astronauts had been on board at the time of the SpaceX explosion, chances are they would have survived thanks to the emergency abort system launching the capsule up immediately. In fact, they would prefer that situation rather than board the crew shortly after fueling and risking an explosion at that moment killing the crew with certainty.
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Nothing big. Just that the last explosion revealed a major issue with their approach to launch.
They've been expecting to fuel the rocket with astronauts on board but the latest explosion revealed that it might not be the best idea.
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There is news. Just today they announced that the next launch is planned for 8 Jan.
As for crew, SpaceX has contrarily argued that even if the risk of an explosion is lower hours after fueling vs. during fueling, it still exists, and the last place you want astronauts during an explosion is in the tower on their way into the spacecraft. The safest place for the crew to be, apart from "nowhere near the rocket at all", is "inside the capsule". Crew in the tower during a sudden explosion would have basically
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NASA's hardly one to speak, having approved the Shuttle with no launch abort system at all
Which is frankly amazing. Someone should have gone to prison over that decision
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As for crew, SpaceX has contrarily argued that even if the risk of an explosion is lower hours after fueling vs. during fueling, it still exists, and the last place you want astronauts during an explosion is in the tower on their way into the spacecraft. The safest place for the crew to be, apart from "nowhere near the rocket at all", is "inside the capsule". Crew in the tower during a sudden explosion would have basically no chance of survival.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, SpaceX is always right and everyone else has been doing it wrong for decades. We get it.
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Simply because there aren't any jurisdictions which will allow autonomous driving anytime in the future.
Doesn't mean people won't rest one hand on the wheel to make it look like they're driving and watch movies on a screen off to the side letting the car drive itself.
It's illegal to exceed the speed limit but most people do.
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and overshadows what's going on at SpaceX
Launching things into space at an awesomely cheap price-point and a reliability that is currently surpassing much of the competition?
No we should bring that up as well. No need to overshadow it.
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Simply because there aren't any jurisdictions which will allow autonomous driving anytime in the future.
Florida allows it in the present.
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I did not know that - are there any products which are certified at the present time?
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I did not know that - are there any products which are certified at the present time?
They're allowing it "for research", but without a special permit. Presumably anyone could just make a driver say "OK" to "For testing purposes and we will log everything".
Breaking, or braking? (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't want a car that breaks, automatically or not.
Then biking (don't fall and watch out for door prizes) and public transit, except for all those times it's not working well, is for you.
Or walking. Or not leaving the house
Re: Breaking, or braking? (Score:1)
Whoosh. The sound of OP's comment going right over your head.....
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Whoosh. The sound of OP's comment going right over your head.....
I understood him but funny or not, he's ruled out *every* automobile.
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I really don't think you did.
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I really don't think you did.
You're mistaken, sorry to say. I'm quite a punster & punisher and double-entendres don't usually get by me in English. I even get some of the ones in French & Spanish.
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Amusing at several levels but I agree with you. It seems that my life is filled with updates of too many various devices. Phone, computer, router, printer, printer, boat electronics, half the crap at work, my little drones, the camera gear.
Nowadays, if it has a battery it has a USB port (of some various flavor, that's another rant) that is there for charging (fine, just pick ONE goddamned connector please) and upgrading. Lately, I've just been leaving things alone. If it sort of works, then it doesn't g
Re:Breaking, or braking? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've gotten to the point where I would rather firewall-off of leave entirely offline a device or a system if I want its featureset to remain static. Learned that lesson with an Internet-connected Blu-Ray player that previously could access NPR "podcasts" but on receiving a firmware/software update had that feature removed.
This means I'm stuck with "Internet of Things" with vulnerabilities because if I patch those vulnerabilities I lose functionality, so I have to spend a lot of effort thinking about my network design (ie, VLAN my non-PC/non-Phone devices off from the rest of the network) and my firewalling rules (default to block-all and add whitelist exceptions, rather than attempting to blacklist) for those things that need only limited connections to the Internet for specific purposes. This is in addition to having to go through published IP range lists for countries to block essentially all IP ranges other than the United States, western Europe, and Japan...
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My biggest complaint is that security updates are now bungled with UI or functionality changes. I don't mean functionality additions, I mean where the way something behaves from the user point of view, a behavior that had no fault in it, is rewritten an the previous way is removed entirely, or where arbitrary changes are made solely for change's sake in order to attempt to demonstrate the newness of the new version
That's a pet peeve of mine. Some improvements in UI are welcome but some are just showy and otherwise pointless.
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Problem is, Windows 7 is getting really long in the tooth, it came out in 2009. Windows 8.1 itself is approaching four years old. And I simply don't want Windows 10.
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Windows XP, Vista, 7 the GUI went slightly downhill
I'm going to disagree with you about Vista. The Vista GUI is a massive step forward. The eye candy uses more resources, but you can turn that off. The search function in the start/windows menu is legitimately useful, the control panel search function is legitimately more useful in Vista, etc. Of course, Vista still has architectural failure that causes it to burn resources in a way that 7 doesn't, no matter what service pack you install, and Windows 7 has the same interface. To me, that makes Windows 7 the
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To me, that makes Windows 7 the nadir
Really? That's the low point?
I deleted Vista after 3 weeks and went back to XP & Linux. But I've been happy with Win7 since before the official release while Win 8.x & 10 are painfully frustrating to use.
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Learned that lesson with an Internet-connected Blu-Ray player that previously could access NPR "podcasts" but on receiving a firmware/software update had that feature removed.
This means I'm stuck with "Internet of Things" with vulnerabilities because if I patch those vulnerabilities I lose functionality,
This isn't any comfort, but you should expect stuff like that when you deal with those products' interfaces. That's one reason I don't. I use a Blu-Ray player just to play Blu-Ray, and I access things like NPR with things like Kodi. To me, that just makes a lot more sense; I'm in control over the update schedule, and then I can go ahead and update all the other things around it. You do have to expect standards-based interfaces in products, but that is the case in many areas. Gaming and playing video aren't
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I think most millenials hope that the Russians hack their camera, and their phones, etc... hackers going through their stuff = more people looking at them.
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Well, Tesla is an American car company. Automatic emergency breaking is what American cars do.
Re: Breaking, or braking? (Score:1)
Re: Breaking, or braking? (Score:2)
Lucky 1,000 (Score:1)
"HW2 Autopilot software uploading to 1,000 cars this eve. Will then hold to verify no field issues and upload to rest of fleet next week"
This sounds like the Windows 10 method of QA. Did people volunteer to be among the lucky 1,000 whose cars get the new non-field-tested software, or are the target vehicles randomly chosen?
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You mean like we do with Windows, new Linux kernel releases, etc?
I'd rather have that instead of all the political noise and slashvertisements.
**shrug**
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Yes, if it were Mercedes, BMW, Audi, Volkswagen, General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Ferrari, Lamborgini, or any other car make rolling out a software update adding features to cars already sold, yes, that would be news. But Tesla? Just business as usual, not even worth mentioning.
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Crumple zones ARE emergency breaking!
âoeHardware 2â (Score:2)
UNICODE MOTHERFUCKER!
Do you speak it! ...and if not, why can't your "editors" spot it and fix it?
Open Research Problem (Score:4, Interesting)
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Self driving cars using just cameras and radar is still an open research problem. Even when using more advanced (and expensive) sensors like LIDAR, there are still a huge number of problems that are not solved. Either Tesla has a vastly better self-driving algorithm than every other University in the world, every other car manufacturer in the world, Google, AND Uber, or they are putting a half-baked product on the road.
To me it sounds like they are just playing word games. They say version 2 hardware is "capable" of fully autonomous driving but doesn't seem they actually have the software to actually able to pull it off. Sensor suite and GPU based processing for version 2 does seem quite advanced/impressive.
If they do manage to get full self driving under ALL conditions working at least slightly better than people I'll be the first to congratulate them. Until then F Tesla for public betas and half baked marketing gimmi
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It is not the same problem, though. A self-driving car needs to navigate from A to B by itself. The Tesla autopilot is closer to an airplane autopilot and requires a human driver at the wheel ready to take over, so if it can cover 90% of the drive, it's absolutely fine.
For example, my current way to work is largely freeways and if my car could manage that part by itself, which by time takes the largest part, I'd be happy to manually drive the first and last few km. While a completely autonomous car would be
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The Tesla autopilot is closer to an airplane autopilot and requires a human driver at the wheel ready to take over
Not at all! An airplane pilot on autopilot does not need to takeover the wheel in a split second, the autopilot has automated collision avoidance systems. If the pilot passes out, the airplane won't crash (until it runs out of fuel). In a Tesla, the driver has to maintain complete control and awareness over the vehicle at all times. It's really no different than driving without their "Autopilot".
Fiery descent to the barge (Score:1)
Say whatever you like (Score:1)
Say whatever you like about Tesla,I would FUCKING love one. If only I had 3X my salary sitting around doing nothing in my bank account so I could buy one!
Oof, good luck and God speed to the 1,000 (Score:2)
Oof, good luck and Godspeed to the 1,000.
WE WILL PREVAIL with help of the ANTS. (Score:2)
I don't see you guys rating
The kind of mate I'm contemplating
I'd let you watch, I would invite you
But the queens we use would not excite you
(So you better go back to your salad bars, your high tech stock options, your parking assist wizards...) [youtube.com]
Tesla rolls out a measly 1,000 overnight autopilot updates to militarize its cars. When the trigger signal is broadcast automatic garage doors will open and an iron army will venture forth. If you have a manual door best to leave it open. They will no doubt gather int