Cars and Drivers

Tesla Announces Autopilot Upgrade For 1,000 Cars

Wikimedia Commons (Michael Rivera)

A software upgrade for 1,000 cars is not very many, particularly for a manufacturer which sells 15,000 a quarter. But, autopilot software is critical to driver safety and is one of the most talked about aspects of the future of the industry. Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) CEO Elon Musk thought a new upgrade was so important, he tweeted it to his 6.5 million followers on Twitter:

HW2 Autopilot software uploading to 1000 cars this eve. Will then hold to verify no field issues and upload to rest of fleet next week.

Tesla has had both good and bad news about its autopilot. The bad is that a driver was killed in June, which using the service. The Verge reported at the time:

A Tesla Model S with the Autopilot system activated was involved in a fatal crash, the first known fatality in a Tesla where Autopilot was active. The company revealed the crash in a blog post posted today and says it informed the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the incident, which is now investigating.

Much more recently, just three days ago, the autopilot was described as nothing short of extraordinary. According to CNBC:

Dash cam footage suggests a Tesla on Autopilot may have predicted a nearby freeway crash before it actually happened.

A video uploaded to Twitter shows a Tesla car driving on a highway in the Netherlands behind two cars that collide with each other.

A Tesla representative confirmed with CNBC that the beeping heard in the video just before the accident is the sound of Autopilot’s Forward Collision Warning.

As the product advances there should be many more upgrades. Tesla does this by uploading these upgrades via broadband

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