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Tesla's New Autopilot To Finally Catch Up with the Old One

This fall, Tesla proclaimed something that made a lot of people planning to buy a Tesla in the near future very giddy. The company announced that all Model S and Model X cars it was building from then on would come equipped with the hardware necessary and sufficient for full autonomy.
Tesla Autopilot 2.0 hardware demonstration 4 photos
Photo: YouTube screenshot
Tesla Autopilot Hardware 2 demonstrationTesla Autopilot Hardware 2 demonstrationTesla Autopilot Hardware 2 demonstration
To support this claim, Tesla even released a video of a Model X cruising through Palo Alto before dropping its driver (can we still call them that?) in front of the building entrance and going to park by itself. The combination of the two was enough to send most people's imagination wild, thinking autonomous driving was just around the corner.

Then came a somewhat disappointing reveal: the new cars, though laden with plenty more cameras and sensors, would need a little time before their Autopilot systems became operational. A few months, maybe. Oh, that's OK, everybody thought, we can wait a few months if that means we get to put our feet on the dashboard afterward.

No, no, no, you got it wrong: they would need a few months before they got to the same level as the previous generation Autopilot. Yes, it seems that before the Autopilot 2.0 can become better than the 1.0, it needs to be worse. It doesn't appear to make much sense, but we're sure there was no other way around it.

In a tweet posted yesterday, Elon Musk announced that "most of the Autopilot functionality for HW2 (cars equipped with the second generation hardware)" might be rolled out before the end of the year. The list of features that are still not available includes some pretty important ones such as autosteer, auto lane change, lane departure warning, side collision avoidance, auto emergency braking or forward collision warning.

Tesla has also publicized some changes in the way Autopilot - both old and new, when its time comes - deals with the legal speed limits. If drivers were allowed to go 5 miles over the existing speed limit before, the new update prevents them from doing that while cruising on undivided roads.

Aside from these serious modifications, Tesla is also feeling a bit festive and has released the now traditional Holidays Easter egg. This year, it's a light show (wasn't that what we got last Christmas too?) played in tune with the Wizards in Winter by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. Well, it's kind of goofy, but it's good for a laugh or two if you have a Model X. Plus, since it starts after you close your doors and lock the car, it kind of makes it look like the car is going crazy.
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About the author: Vlad Mitrache
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"Boy meets car, boy loves car, boy gets journalism degree and starts job writing and editing at a car magazine" - 5/5. (Vlad Mitrache if he was a movie)
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