Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bold plans for self-driving cars in 2017 , and his company took a step towards that goal after it began rolling out a much-anticipated Autopilot update to owners of its newer vehicles.
Unlike older Teslas, vehicles built after October — known as hardware 2, “HW2” — were released initially without the full suite of Autopilot features, which provide advanced semi-autonomous driving for use on highway. That’s because they shipped with different (new) software and hardware which, in the long run, will enable them to be fully self-driving. In the short term, though, this new update, announced by Musk on Twitter on New Year’s Eve, will add a number of a number Autopilot features to the vehicles to get them near on par with older Tesla models.
But, there’s a catch, and the update is only live an initial 1,000 cars. Most owners will need to wait for a wider rollout that Musk said is due within a week.
Musk didn’t go into details of the update, but Electrek reported that the release notes include Autopilot’s Traffic Aware Cruise Control feature, Forward Collision Warning, and Autosteer, although the latter is only enabled at “low-speed.
