Tesla releases autopilot, but urges caution
Tesla has launched its "autopilot" mode, which isn’t quite what it sounds…yet. While not fully self-driving, the software means the Model S and new Model X can "automatically steer down the highway, change lanes, and adjust speed in response to traffic". Elon Musk said the autopilot mode was designed to increase driver confidence on the road. However, Mr Musk said users adopting the software should exercise caution while using it. "It should not hit pedestrians, hopefully," he told the media. "It should handle them well." He added that if the car is involved in a collision, the driver is still liable: "The driver cannot abdicate responsibility. That will come at some point in the future."

Tonight, Tesla makes its cars autonomous. Well, semi-autonomous. And it did it with an over-the-air update, effectively making tens of thousands of cars already sold to customers way better.

There are two things to talk about here. There’s the small story about the features and what the upgrade actually looks like and how it works. That’s a good place to start: This is the biggest change to the visual display of the Model S and X ever. There are new instrument panels, app windows are larger and take up more of the 17-inch touchscreen. Drivers will now get more information about what their cars are doing when in Autopilot, they can lock and unlock their car from the status bar. There’s a new clock!

These are simple cosmetic changes. The Big Story is that all of this—and really, who cares about anything beyond autopilot mode?—is being pushed through to customers' Teslas overnight. The update will begin being pushed out tonight, and will hit every Tesla made and sold in the US in the past year over the course of this week.

Before you get too excited about an autonomous, hands-free present, you need to know that you can’t nap in the back, chauffeured around in beautiful, electric silence.

Even in Autopilot, you keep your hands on the steering wheel. Well… you don’t have to keep your hands on the steering wheel. You can rest them on your knees (resting on knees, palms up, fingertips touching the wheel is advised), or keep one pinky on the wheel. And okay, you can take your hands off altogether for a moment. But after a few seconds, your car will give you a little message, asking you to touch the wheel in some capacity.

If at any point you grab the wheel, Autopilot will turn off, passing control back to you. The wheel doesn’t have capacitive touch, but it measures torque, so any tiny little movements you make against it, it feels and knows you’re there, and at least sort of responsive. But again, you only have to touch it if you want to—unless you’re in New York, then you’re legally required to have one hand on the wheel.

"We tell drivers to keep their hands on the wheel just in case, to exercise caution in the beginning," Elon Musk said today at a press event. "Over time, long term, you won't have to keep your hands on the wheel—we explicitly describe this as beta."

Obviously, there are legal reasons Tesla can’t let you just go totally hands free. There are different regulations all over the country, and stricter ones in Europe, where the company has a large consumer base. TL;DR, this is Tesla’s way of keeping you responsible for your car (and keeping lawyers off its back).

Still, it’s a fairly aggressive attitude, especially compared to the pokey pace at which other automakers have rolled out similar tech. "Regulators need to see clear evidence that the reliability is there," says Musk. "It works almost to the point where you can take your hands off," Musk laughs, "but we won't say that. Almost."

It will get more and more refined over time. Eventually, we want it to automatically have your car put itself to bed in your garage. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk

So that’s all sort of what it doesn’t do—here’s what it does. Autosteer, the beta feature of Autopilot that's being pushed to the Model S and X, uses real-time feedback features and a suite of sensors—-a front-facing radar, a camera with image recognition capability, and 360-degree ultrasonic sonar—-to read lane lines and detect other vehicles. Based on that info, the car steers itself and maintains a safe speed.

So will this sensor suite be enough to enable autonomous driving eventually? In a word, no. "This is not the full autonomy sensor suite," says Musk, though he doesn't believe a fully autonomous vehicle requires LIDaR, which is what Google and other automakers use on their autonomous prototypes. "I'm not a big fan of LIDaR, I don't think it makes sense in this context," though he admits his other company, SpaceX, uses it for its spacecraft technology.