Video: Tesla Model S Goes Driverless with Software Update

In this video, Tesla does a field test of a software update that will bring powerful auto-steering functionality to its Model S fleet. CEO Elon Musk revealed that Tesla will ship a software update “in about three months” that will turn on auto-steering, or “autopilot” as Musk often refers to it. The news comes on the heels of the announcement of the NVIDIA DRIVE PX development platform, a powerful self-driving car computer designed to bring the power of deep neural networks into real-world cars.

We can basically go between San Francisco and Seattle without the driver doing anything,” Musk said of the autonomous system that Tesla has developed.

This is really amazing news. I, for one, was not expecting to see self-driving cars on the market for some years to come. And while the $100K pricetag puts it out of the range of most of us, these cars are all over the place here in Silicon Valley.

At the GPU Technology Conference this week, Elon Musk minimized the challenges necessary to achieve a future where self-driving cars will become commonplace. “I view it as a solved problem,” said Musk, who compared autonomous cars with elevators that used to require operators, but are now self-service.

The future is here. But as William Gibson once said, it’s just not evenly distributed.

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