Tesla 'Autopilot' Car Could Hit the Road in Weeks

by Benson Agoha | Technology

No, I don't mean the for tests - like the Google Car which was rolled out on the streets for further testing in real life conditions - Tesla's auto-pilot cars are about to be available on the market for sales. Three months in fact is what is standing between the test centre and the customers.

Not surprising because Tesla's CEO is no other person than the highly aclaimed technocrat known as Elon Musk who told shareholders the good news on June 9, 2015.

On Thursday Industry Weekly reported that Tesla’s first sport utility vehicle is just about three months from hitting the market, and with will be a limited release of an autopilot driving system.

The idea is to introduce self-driving gradually to drivers and hopefully, eliminate the anxiety that could build up with an outright release of self-driving cars.

"The autopilot, which is in the testing stages, would allow drivers to operate a car hands-free on the highway, but with eyes actively on the road, much like a plane’s autopilot," according to Industry Weekly.

The car is equipped with forward radar, a forward camera, and 360-degree ultrasonics that reach about 16 feet around the car, it would also allow drivers to auto-park and summon the car on private property.

The report quoted Elon Musk as saying: “I’m testing the latest version every week,” adding “I typically have two or three builds per week that I’m testing in my car."

He said "We’re making gradual progress toward what I’d say is a releasable bit of software. But it is quite a tricky thing. and we want to make sure that our testing is exhaustive before we release the software.”

If all goes well, Musk said, Tesla’s autopilot will be rolled out to its small group of limited access customers, “which is sort of our public beta program,” by the end of June.

The hope is that Tesla will introduce a fully driverless car in three years, for someone to “actually literally go to sleep and wake up at their destination,” he said off-handedly.

“But this is an extremely difficult engineering process. I think probably we’d want autopilot to be at least sophistically 10 times safer than a person before we would suggest that someone simply turn on autopilot and wake up at their destination.”

Musk who owns among other companies, Paypal and SpaceX which supplies the International Space Station (ISS), said the company is working on the “final nuances” of the Model X  SUV, and expecting its first deliveries in three to four months.

“I am looking at the latest iterations every week,” Musk said. “We want to make sure that some of the key features, particularly the Falcon Wing door and the second-row seats, are done just right. And provide true functionality and value improvements versus just sort of feeling gimmicky."

Tesla released its Supercharger batteries network for electric vehicles a few months ago, which allows users to charge up their vehicles at Tesla's retro-futuristic-looking charging stations for free. And Musk says the scheme, has grown like “kelp on steroids.”

Tesla also runs a battery swap experiment where customers trade a spent battery for a fully charged one at a designated roadside station, and says, it has not done quite well, and so will probably not be expanded.

* Source: Industry Week.