The future is upon us, taking concepts from movies like Sylvester Stallone’s “Demolition Man” and making them a reality. The era of driverless cars seems closer and closer with each year’s passing. Many car developers strive to combine technology with comfort in order to develop futuristic automobiles. The concept is not at all new but the development’s speed is mind blowing and each day we come closer to an actual working product and not just a prototype.
This Thursday, CEO and chief product architect of Tesla Motors, Elon Reeve Musk asked for a press conference to address the matter of “range anxiety” and their new software update developed to get rid of this problem. For those of you that do not know, “range anxiety” is the fear that your electric vehicle will be unable to reach its destination because it will run out of juice during longer trips.
After this subject was concluded he casually dropped the bomb saying that this summer Tesla cars will receive an update that will allow them to be driven in, as he put it, “Autopilot” mode.
As it happens in most cases he did not give many details but he did state that the autopilot will actually be disabled when you are not driving on the highway. He did reveal a few features about the software saying that the vehicle will be “technically capable of driving from parking lot to parking lot.”
You will also be able to summon it and the car will drive itself to your location. On top of that, apparently the vehicle will also have the ability to auto park in the garage.
These cars are already available for purchase and in just some months they will receive the above mentioned update and gain the ability to pilot themselves. We are not discussing a far into the future concept but something that is available today.
Tesla also announced their new user interface concept and we can safely say that it is stunningly beautiful and at the same time it is a massive improvement over the current one available for the “Tesla Model S”. With the help of Bureau Oberhausen, a team of designers, they managed to create a simple, easy to use, precise and efficient UI concept. Bureau Oberhaeuser recently released a video showing you how to use it.
The existing UI allows the usage of two different features at the same time by placing each function in a separate window. This concept, however, takes it one step further by allowing you to utilize as many panes for contacts as you want at any given time and giving you the ability to resize them to better fit your needs. Energy usage, tire pressure, web browsing and many other features will also be available simultaneously.
In the meantime, Google also seems to partake in this new technology with their own “driverless car project”. Many cars in Nevada and California already hit the streets in order to conduct driving tests.
This week, during the “South by Southwest talks”, Astro Teller head of the Google X made an announcement that shocked everybody present at the Austin ballroom. He stated that they could have offered auto piloted driving on the highway for two years now, but they did not want to rush it and, instead wanted to construct a car that will be able to handle all kinds of driving. He went on to say that at the moment their biggest problem is to predict people randomly walking into traffic.
To sum up, we could have had auto-piloted automobiles for some time now but Google chose perfectionism instead, but Tesla will give us this ability starting this summer.
Roxanne Briean
Latest posts by Roxanne Briean (see all)
- Former Virginia Tech Freshman Sentenced to 50 Years in Prison for Stabbing a Girl to Death - June 28, 2018
- San Francisco Woman Threatened to Call Police on Girl Who Sold Ice Water for Disneyland Trip - June 25, 2018
- Epping Woman Sentence to 20 Years of Prison for Mutilating Homeless Woman’s Children - June 12, 2018