Tesla has updated Autopilot 2.0, increasing Autosteer’s speed limit on highways to 90 MPH and removing the speed limit during off-highway driving.
Tesla is rolling out updates to Autopilot 2.0 driving-assist software that is featured on its Model S and Model X vehicles that come equipped with self-driving hardware.
The 8.1.17.17.4 update enhances Tesla Vision, the company’s proprietary technology that replaced Mobileye, to about the same ability level as first-gen Autopilot vehicles. The update removes Autosteer’s speed restrictions by bumping the speed limit up to 90 MPH on highways, which is the current limit for first-generation Autopilot vehicles.
Also, Autopilot’s speed limit off highways will no longer be restricted to 35 MPH. It will now be functional at any speed up to 5 MPH above the detected speed limit.
Tesla pushed more widely Automatic Emergency Braking, added Auto High Beam, and made enhancements to Side Collision Warnings.
Following this new update, Tesla Autopilot 2.0 vehicles have nearly the same features as first-generation Autopilot vehicles that were built on Mobileye’s computer vision technology. All that Autopilot 2.0 is missing is automatic perpendicular parking, automatic wipers. The Mobileye-Tesla relationship came to an end, of course, shortly after reports about the fatal Autopilot crash that killed 40-year-old Joshua Brown.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk just announced during last week’s earnings call that Tesla created its own proprietary Tesla Vision version of the Mobileye chip in just six months.
“We had a bit of a dip, obviously, because of the unexpectedly rapid transition away from Mobileye, where we’d expected to have the Mobileye chip on the board as we transitioned but Mobileye refused to allow that,” said Musk. “So then we had to basically recreate all the Mobileye functionality in about 6 months – which we did.”
