Elon Musk aims to launch self driving cars of his EV brand, Tesla, by this year, hopes for release across continents
Tesla might launch its self driving cars as soon as this year itself. The company’s chief Elon Musk said that he hopes for a wide release across United States and Europe depending on regulatory approval.
Tesla was the forerunner of the world’s EV disruption. However, as per some business observers, it’s among the last in the race for making autonomous self-driving cars primarily due to the slow progress and reported accidents.
But, Elon Musk, who is known for his swift moves, might pull off a surprise this time around. Tesla’s self driving technologies come under the company’s Autopilot nomenclature. It first came into picture in 2013 offering simple functionalities.
As of today, Autopilot has a full self-driving (FSD) upgrade package and over 1 lakh people are beta testing it. Tesla’s approach is to try to achieve SAE Level 5 autonomy by training a neural network using the behavior of hundreds of thousands of drivers.
According to Musk, it’s really about developing an advanced narrow AI for the cars to operate on to achieve full autonomy. So, his team’s current development focus is on increasingly sophisticated neural nets that can operate in the cars’ computers.
He says his self driving cars will learn over time and from other cars. Tesla’s software has been trained based on 3 billion miles driven on public roads. In terms of hardware, Tesla’s self-driving computer chip that has been installed in its cars since March 2019.
Tesla Dojo is the EV maker’s neural network training supercomputer. Unlike many of its competitors who are making self driving cars, Tesla relies solely on its own super computer which might be 1 of the reasons for the delay.
But, when Tesla launches its self driving cars in such a large scale across continents, it will again create a disruption in the car industry just like how it pulled off a disruption with its EVs.