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posted by martyb on Thursday February 08 2018, @08:55PM   Printer-friendly
from the Look-Ma!-No-Hands! dept.

Tesla had aimed to do a cross-country U.S. drive in one of its vehicles using fully autonomous driving capabilities by the end of last year. Obviously it didn't make that goal, or you'd have heard about it. Instead, Tesla CEO Elon Musk now says he anticipates being able to make the trip within three months, or six months at the long end.

Specifically, Musk said on an earnings call in response to a question about the autonomous drive that they'd "probably" be able to "do a coast-to-coast drive in three months, six months at the outside." When asked whether this feature would then be immediately available to customers, he did say that it "will be a feature that's available to customers," without commenting directly on timing of availability.

Musk admitted that he'd "missed the mark on that front," regarding the original autonomous drive demonstration, but he qualified that Tesla "could've done the coast-to-coast drive [last year] but that the company "would've had to do too much custom code, effectively gaming it." It would've resulted in a feature that others could have used in their vehicles as well, but only for that exact cross-country route.

Source: TechCrunch


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @01:22PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @01:22PM (#635486)
    remember when they had these cars driving in the desert for sport and competition -- the first one I saw, all but one drove directly off course within a minute or so... its only a matter of time (probably sooner than most think, or would like) before they can drive in any conditions, everywhere (or have optimus prime come and get them out of ditch)
  • (Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Friday February 09 2018, @10:28PM

    by Aiwendil (531) on Friday February 09 2018, @10:28PM (#635749) Journal

    Heh, yeah, the fun of overloading the optics :)

    I actually would be surprised if they managed to get a car that managed to drive in by itself in northern canda/norway/sweden/finland/russia within a decade or two mainly due to that those areas occasionally get snow in excess of 3ft/1m (at the time of writing about half of sweden has a snow depth of about 75 to 100cm (luckily the majority of swedes does not live in that half)), norway seems to have a few places with over 200cm of snow right now (sweden is in a rain shadow due to the scandinavian mountain range, so norway gets most of the snow we would have had otherwise).
    Oh yeah, over here we also have fun stuff like moose, think about it like a 200 to 700kg chunk of meat placed about 1m (3ft) above ground*.
    So basically - imagine the fun of the car, not only will it be needing to drive where the visibility is roughly nil, it might occasionally have to drive where the snow will go above the radiator, radar won't really help much (but picking the right radar might help some) and you suddenly might meet with a "driver"/passenger killing event at no notice while the road has very little friction.

    Hence - driving in summer close to the equator is a "meh".

    * = The extreme swerving test that is performed in sweden that occasionally topples cars are informally knows at "Àlgtestet" (lit. "the moose test") for a reason.