Elon Musk is challenging regulators to get with the times as he made it clear last week that all cars Tesla produces from here on out will have self-driving technology.
In fact, Musk says the company is just waiting on road rules to enable this new technology to flourish.
The day after the Tesla CEO made the announcement, the company posted a video showing a Tesla Model S driving on its own around highways and streets in Silicon Valley. The video also showed the car pulling into a Tesla parking lot and actually parking itself.
Musk’s plan to dispatch a driverless vehicle from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017 puts pressure on regulators.
"This is going to have a big impact forcing the hands of regulators," Mike Ramsey of market researcher Gartner told the Los Angeles Times. "If [Tesla] is successful the others will be saying 'we are so far behind!'"
According to Reuters, the new self-driving hardware includes "eight cameras, 12 updated sensors, and radar with faster processing" and will cost $8,000.
Despite Musk saying these autonomous vehicles will be twice as safe as a human operating a car, Edmunds Inc. analyst Jessica Caldwell says the purchase of a self-driving car is a “vanity purchase,” implying that it won’t be of much use in the real world, Reuters noted.
Caldwell says other carmakers in competition with Tesla could come up with even better solutions that would make Tesla’s new hardware “obsolete almost as soon as it’s activated for prime time.”
Tesla’s self-driving cars won’t fully use the new hardware right away. Instead, according to Musk, at least at first, the vehicles will use the hardware to better the company’s autopilot driver-assist technology — lane keeping and collision avoidance — which is already up and running, the LA Times noted.
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