- Elon Musk says Tesla’s rewritten Autopilot feature will be available in two to four months.
- The rewrite is expected to bring a host of new functionality that will have to be vetted for safety before being released to the public.
- No word from Tesla or Musk on how this will affect the company’s plan to have FSD available by the end of the year.
Update 7/10/20: Tesla CEO Elon Musk once again made a promise about Tesla's ability to produce a self-driving car by the end of 2020. During a video interview with the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Musk was asked about Level 5 autonomy and he replied, "I’m extremely confident that level five or essentially complete autonomy will happen, and I think it will happen very quickly."
For the record, the SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers) says that Level 5 autonomy technology "can drive the vehicle under all conditions," and it can drive everywhere. That's a huge leap from what Tesla and other automakers are offering right now. Plus, the company is currently rewriting its Autopilot software. That amount of work on just optimizing what it already has is likely keeping its tech team very busy.
Still Musk continued saying,"I think at Tesla, I feel like we are very close to level five autonomy. I think I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level five autonomy complete this year."
While he gave no indication of what this means for the timing of Autopilot's much discussed Full Self Driving (FSD) capabilities, Tesla CEO Elon Musk did share a timeline on when the rewritten version of Autopilot will likely be deployed to the fleet. “Most likely, it will be releasable in 2 to 4 months,” Musk tweeted as a follow-up to a question on when Reverse Summon would be available on Tesla vehicles.
According to Musk, almost the entire software stack (all the pieces of an application that work together) had to be rewritten, including the portion that labels items in the real world. Musk added that "It's fundamentally ‘3D’ at every step from training through inference."
The CEO did note that the updated software would result in a lot of new functionality happening all at once. But don’t expect a host of new features to appear in two to four months on your Tesla. Fortunately for those concerned with safety, the CEO says it's a question of "what functionality is proven safe enough to enable for owners."
How this will slow down or accelerate Tesla's ability to deploy FSD by the end of the year is unknown. A four-month timeline means November 2020, and if the company still has to verify how safe new features are before rolling them out to the public, it’s not looking good for full self-driving Teslas to be on the road before January 1, 2021.
Roberto Baldwin spends a majority of his time talking people into buying either EVs or sport wagons with manual transmissions. After over a decade of covering technology in Silicon Valley, he's finally escaped to the glorious world of Car and Driver, where he'll be covering car tech in Silicon Valley.
