It’s been almost a week since Tesla rolled out the first iteration of Enhanced Autopilot on Model S and Model X vehicles equipped with Autopilot 2.0 hardware. The over-the-air software update went out to approximately 1,000 vehicles, bringing them to near feature parity with Tesla’s first generation Autopilot. Included in the Version 8.0 (2.50.185) update is Tesla’s Forward Collision Warning feature, Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) and Low-Speed Autosteer, which is in Beta.
Owners that received Enhanced Autopilot initially reported little Autopilot functionality while vehicles awaited calibration. Model S and Model X vehicles produced after October 18, 2016 have a 360-degree surround view of the car, helped by data collected through a suite of eight cameras and twelve advanced ultrasonic sensors.
Model S60 owner, Gary, tells Teslarati that features began to gradually appear as his number of miles driven under the new software continued to increase. “I could tell the vehicle was calibrating because a yellow error message would appear informing me that my cameras were still calibrating whenever I tried to engage the traffic aware cruise control.”, says Gary, adding “after driving only 20 miles total in 3 trips, the cruise control feature started to work.”
While the vehicle’s Traffic-Aware Cruise Control feature began to work shortly after the software update, Tesla’s main feature that has in essence become the definition for Autopilot – Autosteer, now known as ‘Low-Speed Autosteer (Beta)’ – was not functional. It wasn’t until after a few days have passed, and more driving miles logged, that Gary began seeing the early stages of Autosteer beginning to operate.
By collecting real world driving data from Model S and Model X vehicles operating in Shadow Mode, Tesla engineers are able to continuously “train” the vehicle’s Autopilot algorithms until they provide a model with a safety level far greater than what a human driver would be capable of achieving.
Gary posted a great video showing Enhanced Autopilot’s TACC in action and the first signs of Tesla’s Low-Speed Autosteer feature coming to life. Additional photos of v8.0 (2.50.185) can be found on Gary’s website.
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