Teslas will now be sold with enhanced hardware suite for full autonomy

Current cars with “Hardware I” will get better for a time, but new cars will outstrip that.

Megan Geuss – Oct 19, 2016 9:25 pm | 121

Credit: Tesla

Late Wednesday, Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk announced that the company would be adding its own hardware to new all new Tesla cars to allow up to Level 5 autonomy. In the automotive industry, Level 5 denotes a fully self-driving vehicle. Musk said that it would be some time before Tesla’s software would advance to meet capabilities of the new hardware available, which the company is calling “Hardware II.”

Still, the CEO stressed that all new cars would come with the new hardware suite, even if the software isn’t activated.

The hardware includes eight cameras for a 360-degree view, twelve ultrasonic sensors, “forward-facing radar with advanced processing,” and an Nvidia Titan GPU that’s capable of 12 trillion operations per second. (Musk may actually have meant the Nvidia Drive PX 2, rather than actual Titan graphics card.)

That computer will be separate from the one that powers the car’s infotainment system, Musk said on a press call.

Musk added that the new hardware suite will mean that people who buy new Teslas now will temporarily have fewer Autopilot features available until the company has tested its new system.

A video of a Tesla operating fully autonomously.

“Before activating the features enabled by the new hardware, we will further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving to ensure significant improvements to safety and convenience,” a Tesla press release said. “While this is occurring, Teslas with new hardware will temporarily lack certain features currently available on Teslas with first-generation Autopilot hardware, including some standard safety features such as automatic emergency breaking, collision warning, lane holding and active cruise control. As these features are robustly validated we will enable them over-the-air, together with a rapidly expanding set of entirely new features.”

The new hardware will be unique to Tesla vehicles, Musk also confirmed—Hardware II won’t be sold to other automakers as a kit. The sensors are apparently embedded into the design of the car such that it’s difficult to tell a Hardware I-equipped car from a Hardware II-equipped car.

Eventually, enabling Autopilot on this enhanced system will be more costly than it is on the current hardware in Tesla vehicles. This new system will come at $12,000 (£9,200), while the current Autopilot features cost about $3,000 (£2,100).

But if the system works as promised, Musk said it would take a person from Los Angeles to New York by the end of next year without touching any part of the car.

Musk also said that the hardware would operate in “shadow mode” for testing purposes to perfect the way the software works with the hardware. “We’ll be able to grab a lot of data on false positives and false negatives, and compare that to what should have been done in the real world,” Musk said.

The announcement comes a few months after Tesla and Mobileye, the carmaker’s former sensor provider, split up due to a dispute about safety. Mobileye suggested Tesla was “pushing the envelope in terms of safety,” after a Florida man driving a Tesla crashed into a truck while Autopilot was enabled.

Musk railed against this characterization in the press call this evening saying it was unethical for press to cover Autopilot crashes and not cover the 1.2 million crashes that occur in manually-driven vehicles every year. If press coverage dissuades people from buying autonomous vehicles, “you’re killing people,” Musk said. (For what it’s worth, this editor thinks autonomous vehicles and how they work or don’t are newsworthy until they’re as common as the manually-driven cars we’ve been using for over 100 years.)