Tesla FSD Next Big Update Will Be Turns On City Street Intersections, Says Elon Musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the next big update that the company’s team is working on will include Autopilot’s ability to drive a car through street intersections.

Navigate-on-Autopilot (NoA) is one of the most complex driver assistance functions in the automotive industry today. And Tesla offers this feature to its customers so that their life becomes easier and better.

The company is constantly working to improve this feature and according to Mr. Musk, the Robotaxi fleet should appear by the end of 2020 (if regulatory authorities allow this), which means that functionally, all the company cars should be able to drive independently by the end of this year.

The 2020.12.5.6 update improved the ability to recognize traffic lights by Autopilot. This allowed the vehicle to recognize red light and STOP signs and stop automatically.

The latest update 2020.12.11.1 made the Autopilot able to stop at pedestrian crossings, and drivers got better visualization of the traffic light.

Now, the next big step will be the ability of the Autopilot to cross busy city intersections.

Turns on city street intersections is the big one

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2020

For this, the continuation of the car movement when the traffic light turns green is a necessary function. According to Mr. Musk, Tesla cars with FSD are already technically capable of this. But, at the moment, vehicles need to get "training." They collect data from drivers while they are moving through intersections, which is a complex but more reliable way to improve FSD algorithms.

Of course, for passing intersections in different countries of the world, different algorithms will be required depending on different traffic rules.

Mr. Musk also noted that passing roundabouts is also not a problem for Autopilot, but a much more difficult task is to dodge inattentive human drivers.

Roundabouts no problem, but dodging distracted human drivers very tricky!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 7, 2020

It seems that soon all of Tesla’s cars are one step closer to achieving full self-driving. This became possible due to the fact that the Autopilot is learning. About 1 million Tesla vehicles constantly collect information that, after processing, is used as data to increase safety. In fact, every minute the Autopilot improves due to the fact that new data is arriving in its neural networks. The Tesla team is constantly improving it, releasing new software updates, which gives an incredibly great advantage to the company and its cars.

Featured image: Tesla