Self-driving cars will surely play a crucial role in improving transportation safety and speeding up the world's transition to a sustainable level in the future. With full autonomy, Tesla will enable to be substantially safer than a human driver. It will also lower the financial expense of transportation for those who own a car and provide low-cost on-demand mobility for those who do not.
Last Oct. 19, Tesla announced that all their vehicles made from now on, including Model 3, will have all the hardware needed on board to achieve full self-driving feature. But the autonomous software will roll out later, with a cross-country demo planned for the end of 2017.
Tesla Motors is already doing its own early testing, of course, and the video below shows a car with fully autonomous abilities navigating city and freeway streets with obvious ease.
The Tesla vehicle drives itself out of the garage, leaves the city, goes to the highway, exits and reaches Tesla HQ and, of course, parks itself.
According to Musk's tweet, the car reads the signs to see if it is allowed to park there, it skips the disabled spot when searching for parking. He also tweeted this video:
Nay this early look is remarkable because the Tesla system handles the most challenging driving environments; driving on the highway is relatively easy because it's mostly straight and there's almost no unusual stops, blind corners or pedestrians. Driving in a city is a different story because it's basically loaded with edge cases that represent the greatest challenge for any self-driving software for that matter.
A safety driver is behind the wheel while the vehicle is on city streets because it's required by law, but the car is driverless at the very end of this video after it drops off its "driver" and parallel parks itself - stopping for a crossing pedestrian in the process.
He also wrote that when the owner wants his/her car to return, he/she just need to tap Summon on the phone. The vehicle will eventually find his driver even if he/she is on the other side of the country.
