Tesla Planning Self-Driving Cars Allowing Auto-Pilot For Human Passengers
There’s a bit of a race to roll out fleets of cars that can either drive themselves with minimal input from a human driver or are completely autonomous, and Tesla is a company that believes it can make that a reality in 3 years.
Although allowing that a fully autonomous car was not likely anytime soon, Tesla CEO and futurist Elon Musk is looking for engineers to help him develop driverless technology that would get him close. All of the technology will be developed in-house at Tesla; in other words, the company won’t be using or licensing anyone else’s technology. Musk also indicated that the system would include tiny flush-mounted cameras, radar, and “lots of software and hardware level image processing”.
Musk has made his share of bold claims recently concerning groundbreaking technologies that could become real products someday, but this one is kind of a doozy if for no other reason than it’s astonishingly soon. Three years is just not much time, and it begs the question of whether Tesla has been developing this technology for a long time and is close to field testing, or if Musk is just spouting off and this is a total moonshot.
The likes of Google, which has been hard at work on the self-driving car and in fact may one day roll out a fleet of self-driving taxis, is also in the hunt for this new market. The technology is coming, of course. Even in the UK, the DOT believes that it will be testing “semi-autonomous” cars on its roads by the end of the year.
Although allowing that a fully autonomous car was not likely anytime soon, Tesla CEO and futurist Elon Musk is looking for engineers to help him develop driverless technology that would get him close. All of the technology will be developed in-house at Tesla; in other words, the company won’t be using or licensing anyone else’s technology. Musk also indicated that the system would include tiny flush-mounted cameras, radar, and “lots of software and hardware level image processing”.
Musk has made his share of bold claims recently concerning groundbreaking technologies that could become real products someday, but this one is kind of a doozy if for no other reason than it’s astonishingly soon. Three years is just not much time, and it begs the question of whether Tesla has been developing this technology for a long time and is close to field testing, or if Musk is just spouting off and this is a total moonshot.
The likes of Google, which has been hard at work on the self-driving car and in fact may one day roll out a fleet of self-driving taxis, is also in the hunt for this new market. The technology is coming, of course. Even in the UK, the DOT believes that it will be testing “semi-autonomous” cars on its roads by the end of the year.
