June 11, 2018—Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, said on Twitter on Sunday that the company will roll out its "Version 9" software in August 2018, reported Fortune.
Musk said the update would begin to enable full self-driving features, according to the report.
According to Fortune, Musk is not promising that Teslas will become fully autonomous in August, only that there will be activation of a subset of features that will eventually add up to full autonomy. And while cars produced since October 2016 have all the hardware Tesla says is necessary for self-driving, enabling that hardware requires paying a total of $8,000 in optional fees for many Tesla vehicles.
It’s too early to say what those specific features might be, Forbes wrote. Tesla’s existing Autopilot technology is not true self-driving capability, but a set of advanced safety features that have also helped Tesla gather data for training its self-driving software. Autopilot has been involved in a handful of wrecks lately, including at least two in which preliminary reports suggest Autopilot itself may have been at fault.
As consumer interest in autonomous cars grows and vehicles become more complex, Kaleb Silver, senior product manager for Hunter Engineering, says the growth of ADAS technologies will provide a major shake-up for the automotive aftermarket, and have a major impact on services in collision repair shops, as technicians must also understand how to repair the ever-changing technology within vehicles.
