Luxury electric car manufacturer Tesla had promised that it would equip its entire fleet with substantial self-driving hardware. Recently, it had released a video showing a Model X do a fully autonomous drive with absolute “no human input at all,” Elon Musk had tweeted. The demo video shows the car emerging from a garage and drives down the suburban side streets, merges onto a freeway, and finally stops at a Tesla facility. From there, it drops off the “driver” at the door and goes off to find itself a parking spot.
The video had emphasized on the fact that the person in the driver’s seat is only present for legal reasons. “He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.” Musk also pointed out that “when searching for parking, the car reads the signs to see if it’s allowed to park there, which is why it skipped the disabled spot.”
Now Tesla has posted another video that shows what an autonomous EV “sees” as it navigates local roads. The clip shows that the cameras and the sensors have to detect many different objects at all times, for example, signs, traffic lights, pedestrians and other cars on the road. The EV also captures the “motion flow” of the environment to get a sense of where it is going.
The test run was not flawless. One can see the vehicle slow down unnecessarily for people running by the roadside. Another point of uncertainty is how well this demo would work in less than favorable conditions, such as snowy weather or night time drives on poorly lit roads. However, its still impressive, mainly because the car is sufficiently aware of its environment so much so that the driver does not have to touch the wheel even once, even in relatively complex situations.
This video however, shows the advancement of autonomous technology in the automotive arena. The catch here is to convince people of the positives of driver-less cars on the road. As Tesla says, the autonomous is still in its nascent stage with a long way to go for it to be fully operations. Till then, fingers crossed.
