Tesla Full Self-Driving Hardware Press Call 19. Oktober 2016 Musk hält eine Pressekonferenz per Telefon ab, in der er ankündigt, dass alle neuen Tesla-Fahrzeuge mit der für vollständig autonomes Fahren nötigen Hardware ausgeliefert werden.
Musk hält eine Pressekonferenz per Telefon ab, in der er ankündigt, dass alle neuen Tesla-Fahrzeuge mit der für vollständig autonomes Fahren nötigen Hardware ausgeliefert werden.
Transkript Elon Musk
The basic news is that all Tesla vehicles exiting the factory have the hardware necessary for level five autonomy. So that's in terms of the cameras and compute power. Every car we make on the order of 2000 cars a week are shipping now with level 5 meaning hardware capable
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of full self driving or driverless capability. So it'll take us some time
Elon Musk
into the future to complete validation of the software and obviously get the required regulatory approval. But the important thing is that the
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foundation is laid for the cars to
Elon Musk
be fully autonomous at a safety level we believe to be at least twice that of a person may be better.
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So I think that's probably unexpected by most that it's happening right now.
Elon Musk
So yeah, so we're pretty excited about that. And that's also essentially part two of the Model 3 announcement, which is that Model 3 will also have the hardware necessary for full autonomy. In fact, all cars that Tesla makes
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from here on out will have the
Elon Musk
hardware needed to be fully autonomous or driverless. That's where things are. And this is all Tesla vision software. So we're not using any third party software or anything for, for the vision processing. This is a Tesla developed neural net.
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And yeah, although it's somewhat hardware independent,
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it could be, we could actually run this on
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Nvidia AMD or Intel.
Elon Musk
We did pick the Nvidia Titan GPU
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as the main chip for the neural net, but it was a pretty tight
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call between, particularly between AMD and Nvidia. But ultimately we thought Nvidia had the better hardware.
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So that's kind of where I think pretty huge news.
Elon Musk
Now with that we can go into questions.
Operator
Okay, our first question is from Nikki Gordon Bloomfield from Transport Evolve llc. Your microphone is now open.
Reporter
Good evening, Elon. I have got a, I've got two questions. I don't know if you're in the place to answer two, so please pick one. If not, Autopilot's proven very reliable thus far with minimal problems with its safety. But I'm asking if Tesla will be offering indemnity against crashes involving fully autonomous autopilot mode in much the same way as Volvo is promising to do when level 5 autonomy is activated on your vehicle?
Elon Musk
No, I think that would be up to the individual's insurance. I mean, just like it's, you know, if it's something endemic to our design. So certainly we would take responsibility for that. But I think once you use autonomous cars, much like an elevator in a building. Does Otis take responsibility for all elevators around the world? No, they don't. So. What really matters at the End of the day here is what is the absolute safety? One of the things I should mention that frankly has been quite disturbing to me is the degree of media coverage of autopilot crashes, which are basically almost none relative to the paucity of media coverage of the 1.2 million people that die every year in manual crashes, is something that I think does not reflect well upon the media. It really doesn't. Because. And really, you need to think carefully about this, because if in writing some article that's negative, you effectively dissuade people from using an autonomous vehicle, you're killing people. Next question.
Operator
Our next question comes from Jack Stewart from Wired. Your line is now open. Hey, good evening.
Elon Musk
I was wondering, Elon, if you could just spell out how you see this
Reporter
rollout of autonomous features happening once these cars start to become enabled? The press release says that new features will become available bit by bit. How do you see that? Are we going to see full city driving straight away or a more limited feature set?
Elon Musk
Yeah, since this is a new platform, although we've been spending, we've spent more than a year in testing, the feature set initially will be disabled, at least for the first few months. The hardware, the cars with Hardware 2, what we call Hardware 2, which is sort of the full autonomy suite, will actually have fewer features than cars with hardware one. So we expect to reach feature parity following field validation of Hardware 2, probably in December, so maybe two or three months from now. So if there's two or three months, actually a Hardware 1 car will be better than a Hardware 2 car. And then
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every approximately every two or
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three months thereafter is when we expect to release significant improvements in autonomous capability. And our goal is, I feel pretty good about this goal, is that we'll be able to do a demonstration drive of full autonomy all the way from LA to New York.
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So basically from a home in LA
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to, let's say, dropping you off in Times Square in New York and having the car go and park itself by the end of next year without the need for a single touch, including the charger.
Reporter
What is happening to Autopilot in the vehicles with the new hardware? Could you speak specifically to that?
Elon Musk
What is happening to Autopilot in the vehicles with the new hardware? Well, the
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new hardware is what will enable self driving, which is different from autopilot.
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Autopilot is a term that's been in use for more than half a century as an assistance, a flying assistant in aircraft for pilots.
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That's why we chose to use does not represent self driving any more than
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autopilot aircraft makes an aircraft self flying.
Reporter
So I'm just trying to understand. So the Autopilot which has been associated with your advanced driver assistance technology here up until now, is that what happens to that system? What happens to that name, if you will, as you go forward with this new hardware? It's just not clear from the release and I just want to understand how you're handling that.
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basically there'll be two, I
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mean there'll be two options for buying a cart.
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One is what we call Enhanced Autopilot, which is kind of quite similar to
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what the Autopilot that we have been offering, except that it's got redundant forward cameras and it has a left rear
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camera and a right rear camera as well as significantly improved ultrasonic sonar
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and much more computing power. The net effect of Enhanced Autopilot is you should be able to go from, from freeway on ramp to exit, as
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well as transitioning between multiple freeways and
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passing and maneuvering around other cars without touching anything.
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With Enhanced Autopilot then there's sort of
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the full self driving capability which will take care of the much more complex situations in urban environments. And so there'll be two options that people can pick in buying the car. Either basically an improved version of Autopilot or full self driving. So one's kind of four cameras, the other's eight cameras. Yeah, that's sort of what will happen now. The hardware one Autopilot vehicles will continue to improve with improved software as the fleet learning, as we accumulate more miles, it will continue to get better and better, but it is limited by the fundamental hardware that's on the hardware.
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One cars in that there's only one Ford camera, they're ultrasonics, but they have
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half the range in resolution, has the radar.
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And so within the context of that
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sensor suite, the hardware worn cars will continue to get better over time.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is from David Baker from the San Francisco Chronicle. Your line is now open. Thanks for doing the call. I actually wanted to follow up on exactly what you were talking there. Could you walk us through the differences between the hardware suite on the existing Autopilot cars that are out there and this new suite? In other words, you were talking about more cameras, better sensor range. Could you just detail each of those changes?
Elon Musk
Yeah, absolutely.
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So we go from one camera to
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eight cameras and three of which are forward cameras. So we have redundancy in the forward
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camera sort of looking forward and we
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have 360 degree coverage, visual coverage around the car. So that's A pretty big upgrade.
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The compute power increases by a factor of 40, like so 4.0x increase in compute power. So it's a gigantic increase in computing power.
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In fact, the computer will be capable
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of 12 trillion operations per second, basically
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a supercomputer in a car. And then the ultrasonic sensors are next
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generation ultrasonic sonar, which have about twice
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the range in resolution of the current sonar. And that's also 360 degrees. I mean there are also some other minor things like the GPS is more accurate and provides more frequent updates. And there's some other minor sensor improvements on the imu, the initial measurement unit and a few other areas.
Reporter
Hey Elon, I'm just wondering what are your thoughts on the regulations around this? Is it going to be limited based on, you know, oh, in Texas you can do this and in California you can do that and it's going to be different? Or are you just going to say everyone everywhere can do it? What are you thinking on the regulatory side?
Elon Musk
Well, it's not up to us, it's up to the regulators. Hopefully in the US things do not
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become balkanized so that it's different in
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every state because I think that would
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be detrimental to the US consumer and
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I think in the EU it's like fairly confident it will be a uniform standard.
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So it's really a question of what,
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you know, what does the public think is appropriate, what do regulators think is
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appropriate and gathering enough data because the
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system will always be operating in shadow
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mode so we can gather a large volume of statistical data to show the
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false positives and false negatives. When would the computer have acted and would that have prevented an accident? Or if the computer would have acted and that would have produced an accident. But that's operating in shadow mode, so we can say when it would have incorrectly acted or not acted. Compare that to what should have been done in the real world. And at the point at which it
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is statistically significant result that shows
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material improvement over the accident rate for manually driven cars.
Elon Musk
I think at that point regulators are likely to be comfortable approving it. But that approval process really could be radically different from one part of the world to another. It's not something within our control.
Reporter
One last just follow up to that is will, you know, you talk about rolling out new features every two to three months. Will the regulatory environment in the US or the EU or wherever hold you back from rolling out those improvements? Or will you roll them out and then, you know, ask forgiveness instead of permission? If you think that it's that it's safer.
Elon Musk
Well, I mean we've always rolled out our autonomous functionality within the regulatory framework of any given country.
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So this is not a, you know, pleading forgiveness or permission.
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It's we, you know, we work,
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look carefully at the regulations and make sure that what we do is in line with those. Yeah, we can't do anything other than
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that because it would be against the law.
Reporter
Hi Elon, thanks for taking this. I'm wondering is there now that you're moving on to hardware two and you're going to keep working with hardware one, is there a point at which you can, that you'll reach a maximum of potential for hardware one and then you need to, you know, an owner will need to upgrade to the next to a newer car to get the full self driving capability you can offer.
Elon Musk
Self driving will definitely need hardware too, which is what we're currently, we're shipping as of this week. Just because you don't, you just can't do this with one camera. You need eight cameras to be self driving. You also need a lot more computing power to run the vision. Basically the vision AI. So upgrading hardware on cars is not, it's not realistic. It would be like giving the car
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a spinal cord transplant wise.
Elon Musk
So even if possible, best to be avoided. But I should say that people that have Hardware one cars should bear in mind that their car will actually have more functionality than a hardware 2 car. At least until December, maybe later and it's probably sometime next year before the hardware 2 functionality starts to exceed hardware 1. And there's also a higher cost for the autonomous functionality. So it's not, you know, there is a higher price to pay like for the full self driving. To activate full self driving hardware suite, it's $8,000. So that's as compared to the hardware one autopilot which is $3,000. So meaningful price difference. And the car, the hardware one actually has more functionality at least for the next several months. I wish there was some other way to do it. This is not, it's just I don't know how to go into old cars and install another seven cameras and a new wiring harness. So there's no, it's just.
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I wish we could do it some other way.
Elon Musk
But there isn't some other. There isn't.
Reporter
Hi, I was wondering if you plan on making this a kit that other carmakers could use.
Elon Musk
I think this is very hard to turn into a kit because it requires
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a tight integration of software, sensors and
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computing power as well as the ability to do large scale over the Air updates. It's not just some kit that you can add onto a car. I mean, one thing that we've also done with our system is that if you. And we'll be releasing some videos hopefully later tonight and tomorrow morning demonstrating the car in operation.
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But you actually can't, unless you look closely, you can't even tell that a
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car is hardware one or hardware two because we've been so careful about
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of the cameras being part of the frame of the car, such that nothing's sticking out. This in no way makes the car ugly.
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So there are no weird protuberances.
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It's all incredibly subtle.
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Put a lot of effort into not
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affecting the beauty of the car. The car is as beautiful with Hardware 2 as it is with Hardware 1.
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And there's just no way to turn
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that into a kit and put it in some other car.
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It's not realistic.
Operator
Yeah, I was interested in your thoughts, if you could expand your thoughts a little bit about the safety issue. How statistics aren't collected on how safe a car is, only how dangerous it is. So how do you communicate the idea that your semi autonomous cars are in fact safer?
Elon Musk
It's not that difficult. I mean, simply say, you know, how
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many miles have been driven and you
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know, and then how many deaths, serious injuries, meaning like an unrecoverable injury or minor accidents. And obviously there are many more sort of minor accidents. And serious accidents than there are fatalities. So that provides a much richer statistical sample set for comparing the relative safety
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of autonomy versus not autonomy. And we see consistently significantly better results
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with autonomy than without. And that just gets better over time as the system is further refined. Hi Elon, I have a quick question
Reporter
about inclement weather and how has hardware
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2 improved over hardware 1? Well, inclement weather, you mean does it work in snow and stuff like that or what do you mean by inclement weather? Sorry, Anytime say you know there's potential
Reporter
for condensation or precipitation on the cameras
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tends to be a problem.
Reporter
How have you dealt with that?
Elon Musk
Oh yeah. So there are heater elements around on all of the camera surfaces. So it can, you know, just. We have that on hardware one as well. So just automatically heats it up to prevent snow and ice. And then the positioning of the cameras is in a location where there's very unlikely to be dust or ice accumulation. So the triple cameras are. All three Ford cameras are in front of the rear view mirror and in the wipe zone of the car. And then the sideways looking cameras are in the B pillar. They're sort of high up in the B pillar.
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That's the sort of pillar in between
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the front and rear passengers. And then there's the rear. There's left rear and the right rear camera, and those are nested in the side repeaters. And so they're out of the flow of rain and snow and whatnot. And then the rear camera is on liftgate, just above the license plate, but sort of tucked under. So you actually have to look carefully to see any of the cameras, but they're all in places where it's quite difficult for dirt or ice or snow to accumulate.
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If one of them is blocked, the
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system can actually tell that it has some opacity reduction and can alert the occupants in the car to just clean up the camera.
Reporter
Hi. You mentioned that this is related to the Model 3 and the Part 2 unveiling, and I just kind of wanted to focus a little bit on more of that and how it really applies to Model 3. And is this all going to come standard on Model 3? Will there be a way to upgrade like there is now, from what is included as far as the software standard and what's paid?
Elon Musk
Yeah, the full Autonomy hardware suite will be standard on all vehicles that Tesla makes from here on out. It will continue to make improvements, and those improvements will affect the probability of. Of an accident. But we feel pretty confident that the current hardware suite will be at least twice as good as people, on average. Now, in the long term, we want to try to get to a 10x
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improvement, and so that will require ongoing
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refinement of the hardware. But still, something like a 2x improvement
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would be pretty incredible.
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I mean, if that was applied across the board to cars, to all vehicles in the world, you go from 1.2 million deaths to 600,000 deaths. That would be a lot of lives saved, and not to mention all the serious injuries and other things that happen that aren't in the fatality statistics. So I think there's still a lot of merit in trying to go from twice as safe to 10 times as safe. But I should be clear that every cartel that produces from now here on out will have the full Autonomy hardware capability, including Model three.
Reporter
Hey, Avon, one of the questions that kind of keeps coming to mind here is how do you know what kind of testing are you doing to be confident at each stage that the system is safe or is functioning enough to be confident to put it in there? Because it's difficult to come up with. I mean, maybe it's not difficult. What sort of testing are you doing to Ensure that these systems are working well.
Elon Musk
Yeah, it's actually. It's not all that difficult. I mean, we start off, obviously with. With testing with Tesla, you know, with our Tesla QA team. So we're testing initially on a closed track with our test engineers. Then we'll broaden it to a very limited set of
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kind of alpha users, including me. So I usually have the latest software update about a day after our QA
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and I'm personally testing
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every element of the car. Then it goes to what we call our early access program, which is about
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1,000 customers distributed around the world who are technically savvy and don't mind
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or want to use sort of the early software and are cognizant of potential issues
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because there's so many different environments throughout
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Earth that it's just not possible for a QA team to cover them all.
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If that's looking good, then we will
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roll it out initially in shadow mode to the whole fleet. By shadow mode, it means that the car is not actually taking any action, but it is registering when it would take an action and when it would not take an action. And then you can compare that to cases where, say, that somebody has an accident. But if you look at the vehicle logs and say, well, if the car
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had been in autonomous mode, that accident would have been avoided, then, okay, that's obviously a plus.
Elon Musk
You can also say, okay, the car would. The car computer would have done something that would have resulted in an accident. In that case, it was in shadow mode, then obviously that's an issue that needs to be corrected. And then statistics, I mean, these are called false positives and false negatives. You gather enough of those over time until there's clearly a statistically significant sample set. And at the point at which it's unequivocal that turning on an autonomy feature would improve safety, that is the point at which we allow to actually take action.
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Before that we do not allow the
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computer to take action.
Reporter
Hi, thanks for making time. Just a couple clarifications on some things. Are you talking about the new hardware 2 being level 4 or level 5? And just to be clear, on hardware 1, is there going to be any disabling of that technology at this point, or does this continue to run as is? Thank you.
Elon Musk
It will be the hardware 2 is capable of level 5 autonomy. In other words, the hardware is capable of the highest level of Autonomy, and Hardware1, I think, will continue to improve as we improve the software that operates the car. I mean, already with 7.0, it was
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unequivocally safer than
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manually driven cars. And with 800, that has improved even more.
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So it would obviously be crazy to
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turn off something that is preventing accidents.
Reporter
Hey, Elon, just quickly, the 40x supercomputer you described, is it separate, does it
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have to be separate from all other vehicle system technology at this point, or is it integrated with other vehicle technologies? No, it's a good question. It is isolated from the rest of the vehicle. So the kind of infotainment, sort of entertainment instrument panel, the center cluster, anything to do with entertainment or web browsing is isolated from the vehicle control computer.
Elon Musk
Yeah, definitely don't want to be the car crash as a result of going to the wrong website.
Operator
Thank you everyone for attending the Tesla press conference.