Tesla has began to push a brand new software update to extend the highest speed limit of Autopilot for vehicles with ‘Tesla Vision’ to 85 mph.
It is nearly a 12 months to the day that Tesla announced the transition to its “Tesla Vision” Autopilot without radar.
The concept was that it could transition to only using camera-based computer vision in its Autopilot system as an alternative of using inputs from each cameras and radars.
You’d think that more data could be higher, but Tesla’s idea is that the roads are designed for humans who operate them using a vision-based system with their natural neural nets of their brains. The automaker believes it best to try to copy that purely with cameras and artificial neural nets and never let the information from the radar pollute that.
Nonetheless, Tesla warned that the transition would end in limitations of some Autopilot features at first.
One in every of those limitations has been the highest speed at which Autosteer, Autopilot’s most important feature that keeps a vehicle in its lane, was limited to 75 mph.
This was quickly raised to 80 mph, however it has stayed at that speed for some time and owners have been asking for Tesla to lift it. Regular Autopilot with radar would have a 90 mph top speed.
Now Tesla has began to extend the limit for vision-only vehicles to 85 mph, in accordance with an update on Tesla’s website (hat tip to Artem Russakovskii):
“Autosteer will probably be limited to a maximum speed of 85 mph and an extended minimum following distance.”
It’s not quite at parity with pre-vision-only Autopilot, however it is getting closer when it comes to the highest speed.
Though there are other larger problems that the vision-only system delivered to Autopilot.
As we have now previously reported, reports of phantom braking errors have soared since Tesla transitioned to vision-only Autopilot.
Back in November, Electrek published an article titled “Tesla has a serious phantom braking problem in Autopilot.“
It highlighted a big increase in Tesla owners reporting dangerous phantom braking events on Autopilot.
Phantom braking is a term used to explain when a sophisticated driver assistance system (ADAS) or a self-driving system applies the brakes for no good reason.
The system might be falsely detecting an object on the road or anticipating a collision that won’t actually occur and apply the brake to attempt to avoid it.
Obviously, phantom braking is something you need to avoid since it may create accidents if someone is following too closely behind you.
This issue is just not recent in Tesla’s Autopilot, but our report focused on Tesla drivers noticing an obvious increase in instances based on anecdotal evidence, however it was also backed by a transparent increase in complaints to the NHTSA.
We linked the beginning of the rise in phantom braking reports to the transition to Tesla Vision.
Our article made the rounds in a couple of other outlets, however it didn’t really go mainstream until the Washington Post ended up picking the story up with a really similar report that was more widely distributed earlier this 12 months.
Since then, NHTSA announced an investigation of Autopilot’s phantom braking problem.