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Photo via Tesla

Watch Telsa’s self-driving car pilot itself through a city

'The person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons.'

 

Andrew Couts

Tech

Posted on Oct 20, 2016   Updated on May 25, 2021, 6:25 pm CDT

The future of self-driving cars just got one step closer to your garage. 

On Wednesday, Tesla announced that autonomous-driving hardware would come standard in its 2018 line of electric vehicles. In fact, the company says every car currently being produced in its factory already include the needed gizmos that make human-less travel possible. 

To show off just what its self-driving cars can do, Tesla released a video of its vehicle successfully navigating through a city and finding its own parking spot. “The person in the driver’s seat is only there for legal reasons,” the video begins. “He is not doing anything. The car is driving itself.”

The new Teslas include 360-degree camera views with 250 meters of range, updated ultrasonic sensors to detect objects (like people or trucks), forward-facing radar, and an onboard computer Tesla says is 40 times more powerful to handle all the necessary process to keep the vehicle from, say, smashing into something.

As Elon Musk, Tesla’s famous CEO, explained on Twitter, self-driving Teslas even have the ability to pass up open parking spots for disabled drivers to find one that won’t land you a ticket—perhaps from a robo traffic cop.

H/T the Verge

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*First Published: Oct 20, 2016, 10:01 am CDT