Back in 2016, Elon Musk promised that a self-driving Tesla car could travel from California to New York, but the company’s backing away from that promise to focus on making Autopilot safer.
During Tesla’s earnings call on August 1st, Musk said that the Autopilot team is working on driver assist safety features.
The team was working on the technology that would be needed for a car to drive from coast-to-coast, but it looks like that’s been put on hold. The team’s now getting ready to significantly update Autopilot with software version nine soon.
Tesla has been teasing features from the next update for a while, and it’s promised to enable “full self-driving features” and some other tweaks.
What is confusing about this development is that Musk tweeted on June 10th, “To date, Autopilot resources have rightly focused entirely on safety. With V9, we will begin to enable full self-driving features.” It seemed like Musk was saying that the Autopilot team was done with the bulk of the safety features, and was working on full self-driving tech.
It’s tiring to see how near the beginning of summer Musk tweeted that the team was done working on safety and was now working on self-driving. This isn’t an issue since the cars being safe is easily the most important priority, but it’s annoying to always be getting mixed messages from Musk’s Twitter profile.
During the earnings call Musk said that improving safety and existing features is more important. The company isn’t shelving its self-driving tech and it’s now aiming to drive across the U.S. by the end of the year.
Source: The Verge
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