Elon Musk says that all his cars have the necessary hardware to drive alone and he predicts that “probably in two years” he will be able to make a car without a steering wheel or pedals
Tesla considers that buying any car that is not one of its models is like “buying a horse”. He did not lack forcefulness to his executive president, Elon Musk, in a conference for investors this Monday in which he presented with extreme detail the technology of automatic pilot of his vehicles. Musk, together with those responsible for hardware and artificial intelligence with which Tesla are equipped, said that having developed their own technology makes them better than the competition in one of the markets where the future of cars is being decided.
“The fundamental message that consumers should take today is that it is financial madness to buy any car other than a Tesla”, Musk said at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
The exhibition on the ambitions of autonomous car of Tesla arrives two days before a presentation of results that is expected problematic for the Californian manufacturer of electric cars. The analysts foresee losses due to the difficulties of delivery of his Model 3, the car with which he hoped to reach the mass market.
Musk turned the presentation, extremely technical, of Tesla’s technology into a sales talk. Pete Bannon, the Apple chip designer who signed the company in 2016, gave a detailed description of the plate that is incorporated into the Tesla. Musk intervened to make the presentation accessible to the general public. “If any part of this computer fails, the car is still working”, he explained on the chip. “The danger of something failing is less than if someone falls asleep at the wheel. That is the key to measuring “the quality of technology. “The question is how is it possible that Tesla has designed the best chip in the world. That’s what happened”, said Musk.
The Tesla CEO directly linked the company’s own technology to the success of its cars over any other competitor in the next two or three years, when the market, and especially the regulation, of autonomous cars should be clearer. Right now, Musk said, all the cars that Tesla makes have already incorporated that chip, the hardware necessary to drive alone. They only need the software updates that are necessary.
“Within a year we will have one million cars with full autonomous driving capability”, said Musk. The director already generated headlines in this regard last March during the presentation of his latest car, the Model Y, when he said that by the end of the year he will have managed to put one million cars on the streets. There are about 400,000 teslas right now and the figure was understood as too ambitious.
This news comes in the heels of a recent video showing a Tesla bursting up in flames while parked in a garage in China. The incident is under investigation.
Good or bad, negative or positive I will post anything about Tesla or EVs in China. This happened today in Shanghai, China ?? 1st generation Tesla Model S caught Fire ? underground car park.#Tesla #TeslaChina #ModelS #Fire #China #Shanghai #特斯拉 #中国 $TSLA pic.twitter.com/HOwMcvulV1
— Jay in Shanghai (@ShanghaiJayin) April 21, 2019
Tesla presented for the first time a feature called Autopilot in its cars in October 2015, when it was incorporated into the software of its luxury sedan, the Model S. At that time, Musk predicted that in three years the technology would be available so that the car went “from home to work without touching anything”, but warned that the necessary regulation would take much longer.
In 2016, he started working on his own chip designed specifically to make autonomous driving possible. During 2018, Musk insisted several times that his cars were already prepared to make a trip from coast to coast of the United States in a completely autonomous way. Tesla’s autopilot mode detects traffic, sees 360 degrees up to 250 meters away, parks, enters and exits motorways and changes lanes. However, Tesla acknowledges that the conditions to let go of the steering wheel are not yet in place. The driver’s supervision is still necessary.
Some 60 companies are investigating to develop a completely autonomous car. The best known are Waymo, from Alphabet (Google), and the Uber project. Google’s car, for example, is already in tests as a taxi in Phoenix, where it serves a group of users.
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