No matter how controversial Elon Musk is and how many times he makes the news for bizarre reasons, his plan to make cars as technologically advanced as possible is moving forward, promising to deliver an Autopilot feature that customers will be able to test for free.
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According to Mashable, Musk introduced this feature during Silicon Valley’s annual shareholder meeting, where he talked about Tesla’s Model 3 production details, and his plans to build a Gigafactory that creates batteries in Shanghai. Then he mentioned that for the next month, Tesla would be offering free trials of the car’s Autopilot feature, which is a semi-autonomous software that allows self-driving. The site describes this feature as “hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver.”
Musk said that the Autopilot software is currently being worked on every day and that it’s reliability and capability would improve within the next 6 to 12 months.
While all of this sounds very promising, the Autopilot feature, which costs 5,000 dollars to install, has lead to some serious crashes over the past few months. Tesla defends themselves by saying that these incidents are mostly due to human error and, even though Musk didn’t address these issues directly, that Autopilot’s improvements will be dramatic in the near future.
