Tesla: Self-Driving Car Navigates Around Palo Alto, Drives Through Intersections, Finds Parking Spot
October 20th, 2016“Google’s cars drive around like that,” you might say.
Yep, but you can’t buy one of those, and Google is nowhere near having a car for sale. My guess is that Tesla’s practice of iterating their AI from cars that actual customers are driving is causing their lead over everyone else to keep widening.
Watching the Tesla car below look for an available parking space and then park itself—that was a sort of oh shit moment for me. That felt like a significant milestone had been crossed.
I personally thought the last 20 to 100 meters of the journey wasn’t going to be solved for another several years…
Wrong!
Via: Electrek:
Tesla released a video demonstration of a Model X equipped with its latest self-driving sensor suite, which is going into Tesla’s vehicles right now, and using the most advanced version of the software, which will be pushed to owners gradually throughout the coming year.
The demo shows the Model X self-driving around Palo Alto, near Tesla’s headquarters.
There are parts of the video on the highway which might look just like the Model X is on the current Autopilot, but once the SUV is on the streets of Palo Alto, it becomes clear that the vehicle is powered by something else.
You can watch the car navigate through intersections and take exits. For the grand finale, the “driver”, who is actually just a passenger but in the driver’s seat for legal purposes, exits the vehicle at Tesla’s HQ and the Model X tries to find its own parking space…
…
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that “when searching for parking, the car reads the signs to see if it is allowed to park there, which is why it skipped the disabled spot.”
When you have to get back to your car, of course, Tesla will not make you try to find it. You can tap ‘Summon’, like the current feature in ‘Tesla Autopilot 1’, but with the new hardware suite Musk says that “it will eventually find you even if you are on the other side of the country” instead of the 39 feet the first generation Autopilot can travel.
