Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot System to launch next month

As stated on the company’s official website, Enhanced Autopilot will arrive as an over-the-air update in December 2016, subject to regulatory approval.

When quizzed on Twitter when the electric automaker will begin allowing new Tesla owners to use Autopilot’s features, company boss Elon Musk said that Autopilot 8.1 will be released in about three weeks.

Tesla has said it wants to reach full autonomy through incremental “monthly releases” by late-2017.

That doesn’t mean you can let your vehicle drive itself – that’s still not legal – but over the course of the next year Tesla wants to push out software that makes it all possible, once the regulatory hurdles have been cleared.

Back in October, Musk surprised the public by announcing that all future Tesla cars will be equipped with a full set of self-driving hardware.

However although the cars will come with the hardware needed, it will still be months until drivers have all these new features.

Musk explained that the foundation has been laid for fully autonomous driving on the upcoming Model 3, describing it as twice as safe as a human or maybe even better.

While traditional cars have static features, Tesla’s continuously add new functionality and enhancements throughout the life of the vehicle, much like your smartphone. Eight new cameras and 12 upgraded ultrasonic sensors have also been included in the vehicles.

Enhanced Autopilot will introduce slip road to exit ramp autonomy on motorways and dual carriageways with automatic lane changing, while new Autosteer+ means that the vehicle will be able to navigate tighter, more complex roads – the current system only allows self-driving on motorways. This does not mean the auto will be able to drive itself, but the first component of the entire system will roll out in three weeks. Autopilot features such as blind sports detection and park assist are disabled by default until the updates are installed.

Let us know what you think of Tesla’s plans in the comments. “What we’re seeing, if we take a creative engineer and apply them to designing the machine that makes the machine, they can make 5 times as much headway per hour than if they work on the product itself”.