With Autopilot features updated, Tesla Motors is on a good track to becoming the first company providing impressive fully autonomous drive. With its latest press outing, Elon Musk revealed a few more tidbits about their efforts in the future. In short, Every Tesla car from now on will come equipped with the hardware to provide Level 5 of autonomous drive feature. More or less,this means, any Tesla on the road could receive software update enabling it to autonomously drive anywhere (not only on the highway).
As it turns out, Tesla Motors will install new hardware in every car they produce from now on and the autonomous system will be enabled over-the-air update sometime late 2017. It is already confirmed every Tesla Model 3 car will receive it too. New hardware includes up to eight cameras, new sonic sensors, and radar cameras. Tesla Motors takes slightly different path compared to any other company. They will not use any sort of scanning technology like Lidar laser scanners to map out the roads and sense what it happening around them. Instead, Tesla succeeded in integrating a massive amount of sensors without changing the appearance of the car. Remember they did the same with the parking sensors too.
If they succeed in their efforts, Tesla Motors may be at least four years before anyone else in this regard. And that is a lot.
Nevertheless, the video they released about the Tesla Model X using Level 5 autonomous feature is not exactly satisfying or impressive. We can see a lot of swiveling on the road, strange turning and other. On the other hand, this is just a demo. Tesla may very well develop the system in a year or so.
