Tesla's Autopilot 8.0 software update will promote radar from a supporting sensor to a primary control sensor capable of triggering braking without confirmation from the camera system, the company said in details released a day before the announcement. The upgrade, expected to go live in one to two weeks, follows the fatal Model S crash in which Autopilot was engaged and driver Joshua Brown died, and a non-fatal crash in China the previous month.
Under the earlier design, radar supplemented the primary camera and image-processing system, and camera confirmation was required to prevent false positives that could cause unnecessary braking. Improved signal processing now allows radar to initiate braking on its own. The updated software can also access six times as many radar objects as the previous version without any hardware changes, compiling those readings every tenth of a second into a 3D picture of the vehicle's surroundings that Tesla says holds up in rain, fog, or haze.
What the Radar Detects and What Musk Says It Cannot Do
In a press call with TechCrunch, CEO Elon Musk said the system will detect "any thing that's metallic, anything that's large and dense," then brake the vehicle. He described its object-detection abilities as "superhuman" and said he believes Brown's death would have been avoided had the system been in place before the crash. Musk also cautioned against treating radar as a complete solution: "I do want to emphasize that this does not mean perfect safety," he told TechCrunch. "Perfect safety is really an impossible goal. It's really about improving the probability of safety, that's really all you can accomplish."
The update reflects Tesla's stated emphasis on safety in the wake of the two crashes, though the company has not said how the new radar behavior will be validated in real-world driving or how frequently radar-initiated braking might occur.
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