CEO of Tesla Motors Inc, Elon Musk have announced the release of the Tesla Autopilot software update that enables the newest cars by the company to be fully "self-driving".
The much-anticipated launching of the software update is part of Musk's goal to introduce fully automatic cars this year.
In the wake of much technology-based progress and advancement in any given area this year as reported earlier, the plan of fully self-driving cars to dominate our roads anytime soon is a promising catalyst for futuristic cars.
The company initially released older cars known as Autopilot 1 which have the full self-driving capabilities. However, after October, they built cars that are known as Hardware 2 (HW2) and were designed without the full feature of autopilot mode, The Guardian reports.
The reason for the disparity is the problem with shipping in which the hardware and software parts were separated. Musk announced recently on Twitter that the Tesla Autopilot software updates will bring the newer cars in par with the older ones.
Some of the autopilot update features include all the sensors and computing power on board, an Autopilot's Traffic Aware Cruise Control feature, Forward Collision Warning, and Autosteer, although the latter is only functional at "low-speed."
The only setback for this news is that Tesla Motors only rolled out 1,000 of the software updates. So the rest of the drivers must wait for the remaining updates to be released within the week.
According to Tech Crunch, despite great successes for Tesla Motors Inc in 2016, there has also been some tragic news as one of the Tesla owners died in a fatal car accident in May. The company formally stated that the accident was due to an "extremely rare circumstance".
On the brighter side, Tesla did prove to live up to its endorsements as a video of a driver avoiding a pile-up in the Netherlands went viral last week thanks to its Forward Collision Warning system. Another impressive video showed a Model S 85D using instant acceleration to avoid a seemingly inevitable crash.
