Tesla Full Self-Driving Hardware Press Call
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (2)
Transcript
0:06Elon MuskThe 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
0:28Tesla Executiveof full self driving or driverless capability. So it'll take us some time
0:39Elon Muskinto the future to complete validation of the software and obviously get the required regulatory approval. But the important thing is that the
0:50Tesla Executivefoundation is laid for the cars to
0:54Elon Muskbe fully autonomous at a safety level we believe to be at least twice that of a person may be better.
1:03Tesla ExecutiveSo I think that's probably unexpected by most that it's happening right now.
1:13Elon MuskSo 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.
1:24Elon MuskIn fact, all cars that Tesla makes
1:26Tesla Executivefrom here on out will have the
1:29Elon Muskhardware 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.
1:52Elon MuskThis is a Tesla developed neural net.
1:57Tesla ExecutiveAnd yeah, although it's somewhat hardware independent,
2:03Elon Muskit could be, we could actually run this on
2:08Tesla ExecutiveNvidia AMD or Intel.
2:12Elon MuskWe did pick the Nvidia Titan GPU
2:16Tesla Executiveas the main chip for the neural net, but it was a pretty tight
2:24Elon Muskcall between, particularly between AMD and Nvidia. But ultimately we thought Nvidia had the better hardware.
2:34Tesla ExecutiveSo that's kind of where I think pretty huge news.
2:43Elon MuskNow with that we can go into questions.
2:47OperatorOkay, our first question is from Nikki Gordon Bloomfield from Transport Evolve llc. Your microphone is now open.
2:55ReporterGood 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.
3:11ReporterBut 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?
3:26Elon MuskNo, 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.
3:38Elon MuskBut 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.
3:56Elon MuskWhat 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.
4:28Elon MuskIt 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.
4:41Elon MuskNext question.
4:41OperatorOur next question comes from Jack Stewart from Wired. Your line is now open. Hey, good evening.
4:48Elon MuskI was wondering, Elon, if you could just spell out how you see this
4:51Reporterrollout 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?
5:03ReporterAre we going to see full city driving straight away or a more limited feature set?
5:08Elon MuskYeah, 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.
5:28Elon MuskThe 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.
5:40Elon MuskSo 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.
6:01Elon MuskAnd then
6:03Tesla Executiveevery approximately every two or
6:06Elon Muskthree 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.
6:31Tesla ExecutiveSo basically from a home in LA
6:35Elon Muskto, 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.
6:53ReporterWhat is happening to Autopilot in the vehicles with the new hardware? Could you speak specifically to that?
6:59Elon MuskWhat is happening to Autopilot in the vehicles with the new hardware? Well, the
7:06Tesla Executivenew hardware is what will enable self driving, which is different from autopilot.
7:12Elon MuskAutopilot is a term that's been in use for more than half a century as an assistance, a flying assistant in aircraft for pilots.
7:22Tesla ExecutiveThat's why we chose to use does not represent self driving any more than
7:30Elon Muskautopilot aircraft makes an aircraft self flying.
7:33ReporterSo 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?
7:44ReporterWhat 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.
7:55Elon MuskYeah, there's
7:59Tesla Executivebasically there'll be two, I
8:02Elon Muskmean there'll be two options for buying a cart.
8:08Tesla ExecutiveOne is what we call Enhanced Autopilot, which is kind of quite similar to
8:15Elon Muskwhat the Autopilot that we have been offering, except that it's got redundant forward cameras and it has a left rear
8:23Tesla Executivecamera and a right rear camera as well as significantly improved ultrasonic sonar
8:33Elon Muskand 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
8:42Tesla Executivewell as transitioning between multiple freeways and
8:47Elon Muskpassing and maneuvering around other cars without touching anything.
8:50Tesla ExecutiveWith Enhanced Autopilot then there's sort of
8:55Elon Muskthe 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.
9:12Elon MuskEither 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.
9:46Tesla ExecutiveOne cars in that there's only one Ford camera, they're ultrasonics, but they have
9:52Elon Muskhalf the range in resolution, has the radar.
9:56Tesla ExecutiveAnd so within the context of that
10:00Elon Musksensor suite, the hardware worn cars will continue to get better over time.
10:05OperatorThank 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.
10:17OperatorCould 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.
10:31OperatorCould you just detail each of those changes?
10:34Elon MuskYeah, absolutely.
10:35Tesla ExecutiveSo we go from one camera to
10:39Elon Muskeight cameras and three of which are forward cameras. So we have redundancy in the forward
10:49Tesla Executivecamera sort of looking forward and we
10:53Elon Muskhave 360 degree coverage, visual coverage around the car. So that's A pretty big upgrade.
11:04Tesla ExecutiveThe 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.
11:17Elon MuskIn fact, the computer will be capable
11:19Tesla Executiveof 12 trillion operations per second, basically
11:23Elon Muska supercomputer in a car. And then the ultrasonic sensors are next
11:31Tesla Executivegeneration ultrasonic sonar, which have about twice
11:35Elon Muskthe 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.
11:49Elon MuskAnd there's some other minor sensor improvements on the imu, the initial measurement unit and a few other areas.
11:57ReporterHey 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?
12:10ReporterOr are you just going to say everyone everywhere can do it? What are you thinking on the regulatory side?
12:16Elon MuskWell, it's not up to us, it's up to the regulators. Hopefully in the US things do not
12:22Tesla Executivebecome balkanized so that it's different in
12:25Elon Muskevery state because I think that would
12:27Tesla Executivebe detrimental to the US consumer and
12:31Elon MuskI think in the EU it's like fairly confident it will be a uniform standard.
12:38Tesla ExecutiveSo it's really a question of what,
12:42Elon Muskyou know, what does the public think is appropriate, what do regulators think is
12:45Tesla Executiveappropriate and gathering enough data because the
12:52Elon Musksystem will always be operating in shadow
12:53Tesla Executivemode so we can gather a large volume of statistical data to show the
13:02Elon Muskfalse 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.
13:16Elon MuskBut 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.
13:28Elon MuskAnd at the point at which it
13:29Tesla Executiveis statistically significant result that shows
13:35Elon Muska
13:35Tesla Executivematerial improvement over the accident rate for manually driven cars.
13:41Elon MuskI 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.
13:54Elon MuskIt's not something within our control.
13:55ReporterOne 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?
14:09ReporterOr will you roll them out and then, you know, ask forgiveness instead of permission? If you think that it's that it's safer.
14:15Elon MuskWell, I mean we've always rolled out our autonomous functionality within the regulatory framework of any given country.
14:28Tesla ExecutiveSo this is not a, you know, pleading forgiveness or permission.
14:32Elon MuskIt's we, you know, we work,
14:37Reporterwe
14:38Tesla Executivelook carefully at the regulations and make sure that what we do is in line with those. Yeah, we can't do anything other than
14:52Elon Muskthat because it would be against the law.
14:54ReporterHi 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.
15:22Elon MuskSelf 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.
15:33Elon MuskYou 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.
15:52Elon MuskIt would be like giving the car
15:53Tesla Executivea spinal cord transplant wise.
15:57Elon MuskSo 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.
16:12Elon MuskAt 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.
16:30Elon MuskSo 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.
16:48Elon MuskSo 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.
17:01Elon MuskThis 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.
17:16Tesla ExecutiveI wish we could do it some other way.
17:17Elon MuskBut there isn't some other. There isn't.
17:21ReporterHi, I was wondering if you plan on making this a kit that other carmakers could use.
17:29Elon MuskI think this is very hard to turn into a kit because it requires
17:35Tesla Executivea tight integration of software, sensors and
17:40Elon Muskcomputing 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.
17:57Elon MuskAnd we'll be releasing some videos hopefully later tonight and tomorrow morning demonstrating the car in operation.
18:03Tesla ExecutiveBut you actually can't, unless you look closely, you can't even tell that a
18:09Elon Muskcar is hardware one or hardware two because we've been so careful about
18:16Reportereach
18:16Elon Muskof the cameras being part of the frame of the car, such that nothing's sticking out. This in no way makes the car ugly.
18:29Tesla ExecutiveSo there are no weird protuberances.
18:32Elon MuskIt's all incredibly subtle.
18:35Tesla ExecutivePut a lot of effort into not
18:37Elon Muskaffecting the beauty of the car. The car is as beautiful with Hardware 2 as it is with Hardware 1.
18:43Tesla ExecutiveAnd there's just no way to turn
18:45Elon Muskthat into a kit and put it in some other car.
18:47Tesla ExecutiveIt's not realistic.
18:53OperatorYeah, 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.
19:10OperatorSo how do you communicate the idea that your semi autonomous cars are in fact safer?
19:21Elon MuskIt's not that difficult. I mean, simply say, you know, how
19:26Tesla Executivemany miles have been driven and you
19:30Elon Muskknow, 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.
19:50Elon MuskAnd serious accidents than there are fatalities. So that provides a much richer statistical sample set for comparing the relative safety
20:01Tesla Executiveof autonomy versus not autonomy. And we see consistently significantly better results
20:13Elon Muskwith autonomy than without. And that just gets better over time as the system is further refined. Hi Elon, I have a quick question
20:27Reporterabout inclement weather and how has hardware
20:30Elon Musk2 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
20:42Reporterfor condensation or precipitation on the cameras
20:47Elon Musktends to be a problem.
20:50ReporterHow have you dealt with that?
20:53Elon MuskOh 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.
21:09Elon MuskAnd 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.
21:32Elon MuskAnd then the sideways looking cameras are in the B pillar. They're sort of high up in the B pillar.
21:41Tesla ExecutiveThat's the sort of pillar in between
21:43Elon Muskthe 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.
22:02Elon MuskAnd 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.
22:20Tesla ExecutiveIf one of them is blocked, the
22:21Elon Musksystem can actually tell that it has some opacity reduction and can alert the occupants in the car to just clean up the camera.
22:33ReporterHi. 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.
22:43ReporterAnd 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?
22:57Elon MuskYeah, 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.
23:14Elon MuskOf 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
23:31Tesla Executiveimprovement, and so that will require ongoing
23:36Elon Muskrefinement of the hardware. But still, something like a 2x improvement
23:42Tesla Executivewould be pretty incredible.
23:44Elon MuskI 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.
24:03Elon MuskSo 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.
24:20ReporterHey, 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?
24:41ReporterBecause 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.
24:53Elon MuskYeah, 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.
25:15Elon MuskThen we'll broaden it to a very limited set of
25:21Tesla Executivekind of alpha users, including me. So I usually have the latest software update about a day after our QA
25:31Elon Muskteam has it,
25:35Tesla Executiveand I'm personally testing
25:38Elon Muskevery element of the car. Then it goes to what we call our early access program, which is about
25:49Tesla Executive1,000 customers distributed around the world who are technically savvy and don't mind
26:00Elon Muskor want to use sort of the early software and are cognizant of potential issues
26:10Tesla Executivebecause there's so many different environments throughout
26:13Elon MuskEarth that it's just not possible for a QA team to cover them all.
26:19Tesla ExecutiveIf that's looking good, then we will
26:23Elon Muskroll 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.
26:40Elon MuskAnd 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
26:50Tesla Executivehad been in autonomous mode, that accident would have been avoided, then, okay, that's obviously a plus.
26:58Elon MuskYou 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.
27:13Elon MuskAnd 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.
27:41Tesla ExecutiveBefore that we do not allow the
27:44Elon Muskcomputer to take action.
27:47ReporterHi, 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?
28:04ReporterThank you.
28:07Elon MuskIt 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.
28:30Elon MuskI mean, already with 7.0, it was
28:33Tesla Executiveunequivocally safer than
28:37Elon Muskmanually driven cars. And with 800, that has improved even more.
28:43Tesla ExecutiveSo it would obviously be crazy to
28:46Elon Muskturn off something that is preventing accidents.
28:50ReporterHey, Elon, just quickly, the 40x supercomputer you described, is it separate, does it
28:58Elon Muskhave 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.
29:13Elon MuskSo 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.
29:27ReporterOkay, great.
29:28Elon MuskThat's all.
29:28ReporterThanks.
29:29Elon MuskYeah, definitely don't want to be the car crash as a result of going to the wrong website.
29:37ReporterThanks.
29:40OperatorThank you everyone for attending the Tesla press conference.