Tesla Announces Autopilot Upgrade For 1,000 Cars

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 4:15PM EST · Published Jan 1, 7:00AM EST

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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

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.