Tesla Autopilot v7.0 Press Conference
Questions on ElonsFAQ asked in this interview (1)
Transcript
0:01Elon MuskPin in one keyboard clicker. It's like a bunch of photos.
0:14Elon MuskSo see the quite exciting announcement, which is the release of Autopilot and it's Autopilot version one. And you still think of it sort of as, as a public beta.
0:29Elon MuskSo we want people to be quite careful at first with the use of Autopilot. But what I'm going to take you through is just how the system learns over time.
0:40Elon MuskThe thing that's, I think, quite interesting and unique is that we're employing a fleet learning technology. Essentially the network of vehicles is going to be constantly learning and performance.
0:53Elon MuskAnd as we release the software, more people enable Autopilot. The information about how to drive is uploaded to the network. So each car, each driver is effectively an expert trainer in how the Autopilot should work.
1:17Elon MuskAnd I'll tell you a bit about how that works. But it's a combination of a variety of systems and this can only really be done as a connected vehicle.
1:32Elon MuskSo, and there's some things like every car made by Tesla from late September last year overnight will have this ability. So I think that's quite, quite unique that we can upload a substantial new capability just with software overnight.
1:50Elon MuskBasically any car that has the sensors will have this ability. And the sensors were put into the car by a year ago. And the capability will keep improving our time, both from the standpoint of all the expert drivers doing approximately a million miles a day of travel and training, but also in terms of the software functionality.
2:15Elon MuskSo this version of Autopilot, for example, does not take into account stop signs and red lights. But a future software update will be one example of something and will get more and more refined over time.
2:37Elon MuskAnd then there's a feature that I've been posting for a while which will 7.1, which is to automatically have your car put itself to bed in the garage. So you can just tap your phone and have the car just put itself into the garage, close door and also send the car back.
2:56Elon MuskSo that that'll be in 34. So it'll be a lot of cool capability that comes out over time, as well as just general refinements that provide an experience. So let's go to slide one.
3:07Elon MuskYou have a car on the road and the question is, how does it figure out what to do? So there's four major sensor systems. We've got the ultrasonic sensor, so essentially ultrasonic sonar, which gives us, tells us where everything is within about 5.2 meter, or roughly 16ft, 16, 17 foot.
3:33Elon MuskSo around the perimeter of the car we know where there are obstacles. That's then combined with a forward facing camera with image recognition. The forward facing camera is able to determine where the lanes are, where cars are ahead of it, and it's also able to read signs.
3:54Elon MuskIt's been able to read speed signs for a while, for example, but it's able to read pretty much any sign. That's combined with the forward radar. The radar is very good at detecting fast moving large objects and it can actually see through fog, rain, snow and dust.
4:19Elon MuskSo the forward radar gives the car superhuman sensors. It can see through things that. And then final sensor is the GPS with high precision digital maps. So this is important.
4:38Elon MuskThe high precision digital maps are very important because normal maps have quite low precision. All that's needed is to know where a street is. But like the actual curvature of the road, how many lanes there are, how you merge from one lane to the next.
4:56Elon MuskThis is not present in any data set in the world, but we're creating that data set at Tesla. So then these all combine. So we can use the camera, radar, ultrasonics and the GPS of high precision maps to try to car this journey because people had a chance to test drive.
5:25Elon MuskSo you would have seen where the auto steer is using different visual cues or different road cues to decide where to drive.
5:36ReporterSo
5:38Elon Muskit'll take a left lane, right lane, or both. Determine whether it should follow vehicles, follow vehicles, whether it should do holistic path prediction, or whether it should use the navigation database and depending upon where it is.
5:55Elon MuskSo it's constantly looking up where it is in the world. And depending upon its specific location, it will know whether to use the left lane marking, the right lane marking, follow vehicles, to use holistic path prediction or to go purely on navigation on gps.
6:13Elon MuskAnd this really depends on where it is. So I don't know if you went down to 280 for example, but if you're in the rightmost lane of the 280, you'll see the car actually periodically read out the right lane because it knows that it should not take a tunnel, needs to stay in its lane and not do a tunnel.
6:33Elon MuskAnd you'll see it at one point, I mean South island at 280, the rightmost lane takes an abrupt shift to the left. It just steps to the left arbitrarily.
6:46Elon MuskThe car does not change its position in lane just because it knows to ignore that sudden step change in the rightmost lane. And then this is an example of one of the hardest problems that we had to solve.
6:59Elon MuskWhere does it get super Hard. This is the 405South. Just before you get to LAX, you can see how hard it is. This is actually camera footage we took this morning.
7:12Elon MuskIt's quite hard as a person to say, where's the lay? We really need better lane markings in California. This is crazy. If you're in Germany or Japan or China, this would be great.
7:23Elon MuskIt'd be easy. You can actually see clear lay markings. But if you have that, I mean, this is the lane, which are like little bit. I don't know why marking out the lane.
7:38Elon MuskAnd what becomes really problematic in a situation like this is that you've got where the concrete is and where the old lane markings used to be are diverging from where the current lane markings.
7:50Elon MuskSo the problem we encountered, which was quite vexing sold, was that the vision system could not figure out which is the actual real lane. And normally you can exclude sort of strange figments on the road or like skid marks or whatever, because they're not where the lane is.
8:15Elon MuskBut in this case, you have the true lane position and the sort of fake lane position, and. And they're diverging. So the camera system would then follow the diverging system and going to the wrong lane.
8:30Elon MuskAnd so in order to solve this, at this point, the car knows that it actually needs to go on navigation gps. So we'll go for its lateral position, will be guided by the GPS for its lane position, and ignore visual.
8:48Elon MuskAs a funny anecdote that we had was when we did this, we realized, okay, we've got to have times when the system will automatically revert to navigate on GPS where the visual cues are actually misleading.
9:01Elon MuskSo we had one of our drivers in a car actually drive this exact section to precisely map out the lanes. We knew for sure where the lanes would be.
9:15Elon MuskThen we implemented the system. And yet once again, the car would change lanes when it shouldn't change lanes. This is because the human driver, who is a trained driver, actually made the lane change wrong.
9:30Elon MuskIt was quite perplexing for a while. Like, why is it going on GPS and making the wrong move? It's because the reference driver actually made the wrong move. So we corrected that, and now you can actually do this in any of the lanes and it will hold position correctly.
9:48Elon MuskIt will actually do better than the first one.
9:55Elon MuskThis is to give you a sense of what the level of precision that the Tesla fleet is gaining in in terms of figuring out where roads are, where parking lots are.
10:09Elon MuskAnd this is all just in a statistical database. There's no user attribution. We don't know who it was, when it was. It's just we know that this is where a road exists, this is where cars have gone, statistically speaking.
10:24Elon MuskAnd so you can see that here's the user fleet has basically mapped out area in this map and all the way down to the parking lot, you can actually see where in the parking lot people went.
10:39Elon MuskWhat constitutes a real parking lot. This is a normal navigation map, which is fine for general directions, but it's not great for figuring out where the car can actually go.
10:54Elon MuskSo whereas this is a high precision map, so you can see that each lane is mapped out and you know exactly what the transitions are. You know that for example here you don't make an abrupt like 90 degree left, you actually make a curve.
11:17Elon MuskAnd you can see like little places like here. If you were to follow the. Yes, you would like to clip the curve and actually what you want to do is do a curve like that.
11:32Elon MuskSo that's the basic presentation. I think this is going to be quite a profound experience for people when they do it. And we've been testing it for over a year, so we got quite used to it.
11:46Elon MuskBut I've noticed that when, when I put friends of mine in the car and they see the car drive, they're blown away. It's really quite an interesting new experience and I think it's going to change people's perception of the future quite rapidly.
12:08Elon MuskMore questions I want to come to you and we will switch to the people on the phone.
12:30Elon MuskNick James with Mashable was thinking about the site collision monitoring warning system and it said in the little packet that even if it is disabled the vehicle menu, that even if it detects an obstacle, it'll move within your lane around the obstacle.
12:52Elon MuskWhat is the purpose of having it still active even if the owner has deactivated? Yeah, there's two elements there. One is when autopilot is activated, it's using the ultrasonic sensors to, to see if it's impinging on a vehicle nearby.
13:10Elon MuskSo like, let's say there's a large truck, like an oversized truck next to you on the freeway. You don't want to be in the middle of your lane, you want to be offset to one side of the lane that's active.
13:22Elon MuskObviously when auto sear is active, however, we also have site collision avoidance which is active all the time. You can turn it off. So this is not, to me, you can't turn it off, but it's separately turned off.
13:32Elon MuskIt's like automatic emergency braking. Essentially the cyclist Avoidance. What it will do is will resist movement if you attempt to turn into another vehicle or into let's say a highway barrier without realizing it, you'll feel increased resistance in the steering wheel.
13:50Elon MuskAnd so you'll feel like, well, there's something unnatural here that's like you can overcome it if you want to, but it's going to tell you that you probably shouldn't move sideways because you can sense it's like getting harder to move the steering wheel to one side or the other sort of general safety system along with automatic motion braking that's also released this motion set.
14:19ReporterIn the last few months we've seen current Geiger and in this rollout, I mean you're making a point about what you can do.
14:33ReporterI guess the first question is what are you telling us that we should expect as consumers from automaker as in our card in terms of. And then separately there is.
14:46ReporterI want you to touch up during this debate about whether software in the vehicles should be upset. The copyright block of extra disclosed really accessible.
14:59Elon MuskSure. So I think really car makers need to think of their cars as connected devices. And that's really what the way a car should operate much as the way your laptop or your cell phone operates so that you can do improvements over the air so you can either instead of having to recall them.
15:22Elon MuskAnd if you issue a recall, you don't always get all the calls coming in for various reasons. People lose touch with the dealer and then they may have unsafe software in the car but not know it because they get the recall notice.
15:35Elon MuskWe're aware of it. So I think it is important for safety and for improved functionality that car makes in general go to a connecting philosophy. And that's I think also what consumers expect these days.
15:47Elon MuskIt's kind of odd to have a device that's not connected with respect to software.
15:58Elon MuskI don't know. I mean I think there's pros and cons to having software all out there. I mean it is hard to say how software will work. It's not actually in the target hardware.
16:16Elon MuskSo you look at this hardware and say, well, this. It's hard to say if is or isn't going to work unless you've actually done the target hardware. So I'm not sure if there's that much value to open sourcing the software.
16:31Elon MuskBut. And I would be concerned about people potentially exploiting issues. But I think what really matters is are companies testing thoroughly testing your vehicle and testing the software, making sure that it's good.
16:48Elon MuskThat's the most important Thing is just test it and you really need to see the hardware software interaction to go with the safety.
17:01Elon MuskThis is Paige from Reuters.
17:03ReporterCan you talk about. It takes very clearly that this is hands on even though we know that you can have your hands off. Can you talk about the regulatory hurdles that you anticipate so that you can tell your customers please take your hands off and what you anticipate and how that's going to work?
17:23Elon MuskYeah, we're being especially cautious at this early stage. So we're advising drivers to keep their hands on the wheel just in case because the software is still at an early stage.
17:37Elon MuskSo it's important that people exercise caution in the beginning. Over time there will not be a need to have your hands on the wheel in the long term. But in the short term I think it's very important that people exercise caution because the software is very new and so we actually explicitly describe it as beta.
17:58Elon MuskEven though people can access it, we describe it as beta and we say keep the hands on the wheel because it's just important to exercise great fortune at this early stage.
18:08Elon MuskCertainly in the long term people will not need hands on the wheel and eventually there won't be wheels. There won't be wheels or pedals. They'll just be just jumping a car and go somewhere, tell the car your destination, that will take you there.
18:23Elon MuskBut in order for that to occur you need to have fail operational so that if any one system vehicle fails for any reason, the car does not crash. So that's still some ways to.
18:45Elon MuskWell, I think the regulators need to seek their evidence that the reliability is there. The reliability in hands off situation is not worse than a hands on. So that I think there's time and a lot of information needed in order to make that case.
19:06Elon MuskI wouldn't, I don't think we should try to make that case right now because the data is not there.
19:15ReporterHi, Deanna Hollow from Bloomberg. Could you talk a little bit about the early access program and the kind of feedback that you got from the customers that have already been tech through this?
19:23ReporterI guess they've had it for maybe a month or so. And like what was the biggest feedback that you got and how did that help you redefine and keep on top of that?
19:33Elon MuskWe've actually gotten a lot of feedback for quite a while so that we had the early access program. Customers actually had the software for some cases several months, in most cases at least a few months.
19:49Elon MuskAnd their feedback has helped us make the make it better, keep making it better. Generally the response has been that they really love it, they think it's quite profound.
20:04Elon MuskAnd they're playing. We have anecdotes of customers that have actually canceled their vacations because there was a new update in the software. So they really, really liked it. But I think the feedback is all kind of fairly obvious stuff.
20:22Elon MuskI mean it's necessary, but obvious like the car didn't behave correctly in this particular location. And so what do you do for you about that? And a lot of it is sort of, it's actually automatic.
20:35Elon MuskSo without people actually having to send us a note, we can see that there was an intervention. So when we look at say a map, we can see where did drivers assume manual control.
20:48Elon MuskAnd if we see that a lot of drivers are taking manual control at the same point, then we know that there's something wrong with the software at that point.
20:58Elon MuskNo worries if it's just randomly distributed means somebody just decided to go from automatic to manual back. But if it's always at the same place on highway, we know that there's some issue that needs to be looking at.
21:09Elon MuskSo that sort of automated reporting has been the most helpful for improving the system. We can see that it's always at this particular juncture that the car does something wrong, people take manual control, then we go look at that location, see what the issue is and fix the software.
21:31Elon MuskYeah, it's been tested in I think most of markets that Tesla's operating in. So it seems to work quite well. It does tend to work better in places where there are clear markings in the world.
21:46Elon MuskSo it works really well in Germany for example. Yes, it works best where the infrastructure is, is good. And in order for it to work really well, you want clear markings in the road or you want it to be in quite dense traffic.
22:07Elon MuskSo those are the two places where it works really well.
22:14Elon MuskIt's a real boon in a high traffic situation. So if you're in slow moving gridlock traffic and on autopilot and it kind of works super well,
22:27Elon MuskAlmost to the point where you can take your hands off. I won't say you can take your hands off, but almost. Almost. Some people may. I don't think you can.
22:40Elon MuskHi Greg, I'm here at TechCrunch. So with Tesla and a couple other teams which kind of independently working on this problem, do you guys have to worry about logical conflicts within these independent code bases?
22:53Elon MuskJust the cars not really knowing how to react to each other when it's not a human driving? Well, the density of cars that have autopilot is pretty Low. So I think it'll be a while before worrying too much about it.
23:08Elon MuskBut I mean we essentially make in autopilot, we try to make the car behave as though it's a really good chauffeur. It was like a really good driver but not too conservative, not too aggressive.
23:26Elon MuskWhen the cars interact with each other. I would think it would just be like as though the cars interacting with good human. So we don't really see any issues with.
23:52Elon MuskHey, Marco Della Cava with USA Today. Similar question got Audi working on pilot assist pretty aggressively. BMW at CES last year showed us their self valeting car. How important is it to you personally and to Tesla to try and be first though on these things?
24:14Elon MuskWell, I mean general Tesla, we try to pioneer new technology. I mean I think the two biggest, the two most profound innovations in automotive since the moving production line are electrification and autonomy.
24:35Elon MuskSo it makes sense to try to pioneer things in those two regions. Those things really make a difference to the world individually and collectively. But it's not, you know, the goal is not to be first for the safety first.
24:50Elon MuskWe just want to make an amazing vehicle and make the best possible car that could be made. That's really, that's really all. And you know, we've gotten some pretty good accolades in this regard.
25:09Elon MuskSome reports that they adjust the rating system. That was reported by.
25:18Elon MuskDavid Baker with the Chronicle. I wanted to follow up on the question that the reporter from lawyers was asking. So far there's been sort of a perceived difference in velocities, different autonomous car programs, whether you want to push toward a future where you don't have the steering or whether you want a future where you still do have cars that people can drive on great roads that we've done parts of.
25:46Elon MuskDo you want a future where you just get a little odd and it takes you wherever and you don't worry about it, or do you want a future where people drive your car?
25:59Elon MuskI think you want to have, I think probably want to have the steering wheel and pedals and be able to take control of the car when you want to take control.
26:12Elon MuskI mean, I don't super love the idea of having a bland flow that you just get in and go from one place to the other and innovation, conservative driving manner or something like that.
26:22Elon MuskSounds boring, but I mean it might be, you know, might be something like an iRobot where the car has autonomous mode but you can switch to manual when you want to and the steering wheel comes out of the dash.
26:40Elon MuskLooks kind of cool. That looked cool. Yeah, like the Snake Charger.
26:49ReporterYeah.
26:49Elon MuskSo I think autonomy default, but with optional manual is probably the good way to go. Elon, I want to give folks on the phone a chance to ask questions.
27:01ReporterSure,
27:06Elon MuskGo ahead. On the phone. Okay, so our first question is going to come from. Hello, Yahoo Autos, this is Chuck Turner with Yahoo Autos. I'm wondering how does the autopilot, or how do you perceive the autopilot differing from similar technology from say Audi or Mercedes, such as the adaptive cruise control, stop and go and their lane keeping technology as well?
27:38Elon MuskYeah, I think that's the biggest differentiated here is that the whole Tesla fleet operates as a network. When one car learns something, the whole fleet learns it. And in order to have that, all the cars need to be connected.
27:53Elon MuskThey need to be sort of uploading data to a central server where it can be collected, do statistical analysis on it and then feed that back into a driving algorithm to cars.
28:07Elon MuskSo that, I mean that's sort of, I would say like next level and certainly far beyond what any other car company is doing. I'm not sure they even thinking about it.
28:16Elon MuskNever heard them mention it that way. So being able to do fleet learning, this is quite a powerful network effect. And any car company that doesn't do this will not be able to have a good autonomous driving system.
28:34Elon MuskNext question.
28:37ReporterHi, Katie Farranbloker 4:2. Are you talking about machine learning?
28:43Elon MuskYeah, I mean it is kind of machine learning and it is with the drivers of the cars being essentially providing the training data set. They're training a collective lead intelligence of, you know, what has.
29:02ReporterYeah. Will it be like an automatic learning system or.
29:06Elon MuskIt is an automatic learning system.
29:07ReporterOkay, I have another question too.
29:11Elon MuskI mean, yeah, that was questions like if I'm so afraid of AI, why am I doing this?
29:20ReporterAnd
29:23Elon MuskI don't think we have anything to worry about. Cars driving themselves that's not, you know, they're not going to take over the world. It's, I mean the concern was more like a deep AI, like and potentially one that's, you know.
29:36Elon MuskYeah, yeah, some sort of. Yeah, some sort of AI that, you know, either due to itself or people driving in that direction that makes the world tries to drive civilization in a direction that's not good.
29:54Elon MuskI don't know. I mean, I just think we need to be cautious about this, that's all. That's my general comment on AI. It's like we shouldn't be sort of going willy nilly in that direction thinking it's always going to be good.
30:04ReporterOkay. My follow up was actually about the mapping system. So the data available in like Google Maps or Here Maps or Apple Maps or something, that's not good enough data for the automatic, the autopilot driving system currently.
30:22ReporterSo do you plan to do this combination of these, like, personal drivers, right, driving around, Tesla employees driving around and getting that data plus the Tesla fleet. Are you going to be doing that for the world when you get all the data for the high precision maps that you want?
30:41Elon MuskYeah, I think the data is really going to come primarily from the Tesla fleet. So we've got.
30:49Elon MuskCars that are doing 1/2 million miles a day, of which two thirds have the autonomy capability, but all one and a half billion actually are connected and can provide information about high precision information about routes.
31:09Elon MuskAnd I think we'd certainly be open to selling that to other car companies or other organizations if they want to buy it. But it's really the fleet collectively that is producing this data set.
31:29Elon MuskAnd then we're using that to provide high precision GPS navigation. You do need an additional overlay on that to understand, like, turn restrictions to a certain degree. Because if you simply say, like, if the number of cars that say, turn left at an intersection is 0.5% of the time, then it's probably they're just doing illegal laps.
31:54Elon MuskSo then you should ignore that. You'll see statistically if a turn is allowed or not allowed.
32:03ReporterSo
32:05Elon Muskand you can also say, okay, the speed, but the true speed on these roads is the speed. And then you know, how fast to go around a bend or what's really safe.
32:17Elon MuskYou can say, like, the average driver goes this speed in this lane when doing this turn. So that's that level of detailed information which is like, how would an expert driver drive?
32:32Elon MuskThis route is really what we're talking about. It's really, it's an order of magnitude or more detailed than current navigation maps. It might be like, in terms of data volume, maybe 100 times the data complexity of current navigation map, maybe more.
32:52Elon MuskWe have a lot of people patiently waiting on the phone, so, Ken, can we. Let's take the next three calls from the phone line. Go ahead. The line of Nikki at Transport Evolved is now open.
33:04ReporterGood afternoon, Elon. I've got two questions, really, that I'd like to pose to you. The first one regarding GPS and data access. I know that, you know, if you're in the Bay Area, we have a lot of great cell phone connectivity, but in certain parts of the us, in certain parts of the world, that's not going to Be a big issue.
33:22ReporterSorry, that is going to be a big issue. And connectivity is going to be lost. How will the cars automatically switch between the modes? That's my first part. And the second part is Google, Audi, all these other companies who have worked on autonomous driving to this point, some of them have posted massive bonds to be able to test some kind of autonomous or autopilot feature on the road.
33:43ReporterHas Tesla had to put anything like that into provision if there's any accidents in the future?
33:50Elon MuskYeah, well, as far as sort of gathering navigation data where there's no cell connectivity, the car can just buffer the data and then upload the data once it gets to a place where there is cell connectivity or a WI FI connection.
34:06Elon MuskSo there's no problem collecting data even where there's no cell phone connectivity. And then of course, the GPS satellites you can see all the time. So even in like anywhere on earth you can see the GPS satellite.
34:21Elon MuskSo whether you're not you, whether or not you have the connectivity in that area, you can still use the drive on GPS functionality. With respect to posting big bonds, I'm not aware of that.
34:37Elon MuskI'm not sure what they're doing exactly on that front. I think the logical thing is that.
34:48Elon MuskIf there are fewer accidents in autonomous mode than in non autonomous mode, there shouldn't be some penalty. That wouldn't make any sense. You'd be penalizing a safer situation.
35:04ReporterNext question.
35:09Elon MuskOkay, the line of Mike Ramsey from Wall Street Journal is now open. Hi, thanks a lot. I'm curious about two things. One, after the updates are uploaded and improvements are made, are those done in constant stream, like on a daily basis, or are you waiting for like, would you wait for like a 7.1 or something like that?
35:31Elon MuskAnd the second question is, as you move past this level of autonomy to something greater, would you need to add more sensors like a lidar, or do you think that it would be possible to go to a greater level of autonomy with the sensor set that you have now?
35:53ReporterYeah,
35:56Elon MuskI mean, I think we can go to, we can improve the level of autonomy with the sensor set that we have right now, but it is limited to what logically could be done with the sensor set.
36:07Elon MuskSo imagine if you had a road control car and you had access to this set of data, which is a forward facing camera, Forward radar and 360 degree ultrasonics.
36:20Elon MuskIf you could see that data remotely and you were a really good driver with a remote control car, how well could you drive the car? That essentially sets the limit on what the sensors can do.
36:31Elon MuskSo there's certainly more that can be done, but it's not. The sensor suite is not the sort of full autonomy suite. For full autonomy, you'd obviously need 360 degree cameras.
36:44Elon MuskYou'd need probably redundant Ford cameras, you'd need redundant computing hardware and then redundant motors and the steering rack. You really want to have, I think, for full autonomy, a more comprehensive sensor suite and control systems that computing systems that are fail operation.
37:11Elon MuskThat said, I don't think you need lidar. I think lidar, you do this all with passive optical and then with maybe one forward radar. If you're driving fast into rain or snow or dust, I think that completely solves it without the use of lidar.
37:32Elon MuskI'm not a big fan of lidar. I don't think it makes sense in this context. We do use lidar for our Dragon spacecraft. We're docking with the space station and I think it makes sense and we put a lot of effort into developing that.
37:45Elon MuskSo as long as I don't like lidar in general, it's just like, I don't think it makes sense in a car context. I don't think it's. I think it's unnecessary.
37:56Elon MuskYeah, and sorry, what was the first part of the question? Oh, yeah, sorry. People should see the car actually improve, probably with each passing week. So even without a new software update, because the data is continually improving, because the more miles that are driven, the better the sort of network intelligence the fleet is trained, the better it will get.
38:30Elon MuskSo it should actually get better with each passing day. But you will probably notice it maybe after a week or a few weeks, and you'll see that previously the car wouldn't have steered quite right.
38:45Elon MuskLike literally going past a freeway walk ramp one week, but then the following week it does. Next question. Daniel Sparks.
38:58ReporterMolly.
38:58Elon MuskAnd our next question.
39:00ReporterYeah.
39:01Elon MuskIs there any consideration for offering a retrofit option of autopilot hardware to early Model S owners at some point? So the tricky thing with the retrofit is it would require changing a lot of systems on the car and a new wiring harness.
39:17Elon MuskSo it's not as though we wouldn't. If we thought there was some reasonable way to offer a retrofit, we would do so. But to be able to add a radar system and a camera system and some visual computing hardware and the 360 ultrasonics, this would be a huge effort to do at the service center.
39:41Elon MuskI mean, you'd have to replace the front bumper or the windscreen, take the whole car apart to remove the wiring harness. So it's technically possible, but there's no way it would make any financial sense.
39:55Elon MuskLet's take one more call from the phone line. So, Bob from Road and Track magazine. Hi, I was just wondering how weatherproof is the lane sensing feature. Like can it see the lane lines through rain or through snow?
40:12Elon MuskWhat are the limitations there?
40:15ReporterYeah,
40:17Elon Muskif there's heavy snow, it's going to be harder to for the system to work. So we'd certainly advise caution in heavy precipitation. I mean, essentially it's like a person to some degree.
40:31Elon MuskIt's like how well can a person figure out what route they should take? And you know that they're going to be in the beginning, it's going to be not as good as a person, but then over time, or not as good as a person in some ways better than a person in other ways.
40:45Elon MuskOver time it will actually be better than better than a person.
40:56Elon MuskI mean, long term it'll be way better than person. Because it's like just say, imagine a system that has say eight cameras and radar and ultrasonics and, and it's processing all of that at the millisecond level and never gets tired.
41:13Elon MuskAnd it's never had anything to drink and it's not arguing with someone in the car, hopefully, so it's not distracted. And it has this huge data set. There's just no way that that would be like competing with eight human experts simultaneously.
41:35Elon MuskThere's just no way one person's gonna be better than. You don't have eyes in the back of your head. You know, it's like, so it will obviously be way better than the person wants.
41:46Elon MuskWe're going to come back into the room, take some questions from here, have a say, handle pedestrians at the moment. Sure. So.
42:02Elon MuskI mean it should not if pedestrians, hopefully. So it does sense pedestrians. It can see pedestrians, can see cyclists. So it should avoid them or it should actually break before hitting them or should handle them well.
42:24Elon MuskHopefully exercise caution at this early stage.
42:32Elon MuskPedestrian can't exercise, fortunately doesn't know which is self driving. Are you talking about the car today or the car in the future? There's a difference between the car today and the car in the future.
42:41Elon MuskBig differences. Those meetings, days. Yeah, I mean, that's why we, you know, in the beginning we really recommend that in fact we, you know, instructions say you need to pay attention to what's on the road and you need to be ready to take the wheel at any time.
42:59Elon MuskSo I certainly wouldn't want to say that today. Don't worry about it. In the long term, it will be safer than a person driving for all pedestrians as well as for people in the car and other cars.
43:17ReporterI had a couple of logistical questions. When will the update be available in terms of cars? When is the state 7.1 coming and what about the Model X?
43:27Elon MuskWe're not going to do Model X questions today, but when will it work on the Model X? So we expect to begin uploading the software tonight to customers. So sometime late tonight it'll begin uploading and people should begin to be able to install it tomorrow.
43:50Elon MuskIt'll probably take a few days to I send it out to the whole fleet, but it'll start sometime tonight. And that's for North America. For Europe and Asia, it's about a week out because we're just waiting for final regulatory approval.
44:09Elon MuskSo hopefully we'll receive regulatory approval for Europe and Asia sometime next week.
44:21Elon MuskWell, actually all cars will receive version 7 and then roughly 60% of those cars. So there's roughly 60,000 cars that have autonomous capability, but all cars will receive version 7 just like once you have your orders here and all of them.
44:47Elon MuskHi Reuters. This could possibly be a pretty expensive add on. And since the future is looking like you need to make some sort of inexpensive mass market car, do you see this being something that is standard on all this is going forward or an option you can remove in order to have a more affordable future?
45:06Elon MuskWell, the way we make the cars right now is that the hardware is standard on all cars and then you pay to have the autopilot convenience features. So the safety features are standard on all cars.
45:18Elon MuskSo it'll be active emergency braking site, collision avoidance, lane departure warning. Basically all the safety features are standard on all cars and then the convenience features you pay $2,500 to enable.
45:35Elon MuskSo essentially we actually take a slight loss on people that don't pay for the convenience features and then make a gain on those that do. So hopefully that works out.
45:43Elon MuskBut I think in logsim we would have the hardware for autonomy on all
45:48Reporterclusters,
45:52Elon Muskbut that would just be an app charge for the convenience. Two more questions.
46:10Elon MuskSo a question from Jonathan at Ars Technica. Hi, yes. Going back to the future of autonomous cars, when do you think Tesla might be ready to start selling cars that are autonomous to level four?
46:26Elon MuskWell, I think from a technology standpoint, and it is important to distinguish these things because they are very, very different technologically. I think Tesla will be able to will have a car that can do full autonomy in about three years.
46:42Elon MuskSo maybe A bit sooner. But I'm trying to recalibrate my sort of time predictions. So I think I'm quite confident that within three years the car will be able to take you from point to point, basically from your driveway to work without you touching anything.
47:04Elon MuskYou could be asleep the whole time and do so very safely. However, from that point, to get regulatory approval for full autonomy is something that's going to vary by jurisdiction.
47:18Elon MuskSo depending upon where you are in the world and how the legal framework works and what the regulations are, that could be anywhere from another year to maybe several years.
47:34Elon MuskI think the thing that would obviously be convincing to a regulator is to see lots of data about how autonomy is working. Is it safer or less safe than human driven car?
47:46Elon MuskAnd at the point which the data says statistically that it's much safer to have autonomous cars, that's the point which regulators will obviously be comfortable allowing a full autonomy.
48:02Elon MuskAnother question from Deanne Durbin at the Associated Press.
48:06ReporterHi, thanks for taking the question. Can you just clarify? I think you spoke about it earlier, but I can't hear very well. Is the Model X going to get this capability?
48:16ReporterAnd also if you are, if you're. If your car is automatically changing lanes and it gets in an accident, who is liable?
48:27Elon MuskYeah. So the Model X will of course also have the same autopilot capability as the S, so they'll have identical capability. And if there is an accident, the. The driver of the car is liable.
48:42Elon MuskSo we're very clearly saying that this is not a case of abdicating responsibility. The hardware and the software are not yet at the point where a driver can abdicate responsibility.
48:56Elon MuskThat will come at some point in the future, but it is not the case today. These are still the early days.
49:07ReporterCould you talk a little bit about how many people are actively working on Autopilot within Tesla? Because in terms of headcount, you guys are north of like 13,000 employees, right?
49:15Elon MuskYeah, 14,000.
49:17Reporter14,000. So what's the size of the unit? And I'm sure it's interdisciplinary, so I don't even know if calling it a unit is accurate.
49:26Elon MuskYeah, it's actually not a. Not a huge team doing autopilot. So we've got maybe in terms of people just working autopilot software, it's maybe 50 people. In terms of those working on the Autopilot hardware suite, it's maybe a little bigger, maybe 100 people, something like that.
49:47Elon MuskIt will increase over time, but generally with software, you get amazing things done with small teams, and a small team will do much more radical improvements, innovation,
50:09Elon MuskVery nuts and bolts. One I'm not sure that I understood you clearly earlier. When people get this, when they get into their cars tomorrow and see them loaded up, do they have to pay to actually use the Autopilot feature a one time?
50:24Elon MuskYeah. So it actually depends. People would have done this when they bought the car. They could also do it after they own the car as well. So it's just basically $2,500 to activate the autonomous features for forever.
50:37Elon MuskIt's a one time charge. And then the autonomous features work. As I said, though, the safety features are automatically enabled on all cars. So even if somebody hasn't done that, they'll still get, for example, side collision Voidance as part of the version 7 software.
50:57Elon MuskAll right, thanks, everyone. Thank you. Thank you very much.
52:06Elon MuskSam.