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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
(Score: 4, Interesting) by vux984 on Thursday February 08 2018, @09:28PM (1 child)
That's impressive, but honestly, I'd be more impressed if it could do my trip to the office and back.
One highway mile is pretty much the same as the next. So if you can do one, doing 3000 more of them isn't really a challenge.
Where I deal with a busy round about adjacent to an elementary school full of kids and parents stopping to do drop offs; with crossing guards and volunteers directing some of the traffic, to an extremely tight parkade where you have to coordinate a lot with other drivers to get past eachother in turns or if a pickup is in a small-car spot, to just a typical downtown city core with its turn lanes, bus lanes, stalls, ambulance and police activity... I've got to believe 20 miles of that is a lot harder than 3000 miles of 'staying in the middle of a nice wide interstate lane, while not hitting the car in front of you'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 09 2018, @01:27AM
This isn't a demo for you and I. Unless you and I happen to own a semi or long-distance haulage company.