Tesla Autopilot

A report released Thursday by the National Transportation Safety Board said that a Tesla Model X fitted with the automaker's Autopilot self-driving car tech accelerated on its own before striking a damaged highway barrier near Mountain View, California, in March. The impact killed the Tesla's...Read More»

British insurer Direct Line is now offering a 5 percent discount to Tesla drivers to encourage them to use semi-autonomous driving tech. The offer is part of a collaboration between the insurance company and Tesla, which is estimated to have sold over 2,500 vehicles equipped with its Autopilot tech...Read More»

On May 7, 2016, Joshua Brown was killed when his Tesla Model S collided with an 18-wheeler in Williston, Florida. News of the fatal accident was accompanied by plenty of speculation about what Brown had been doing at the time of the crash. A newly published, 538-page report from the National...Read More»

Tesla recently rolled out its Autopilot 8.1 software update, offering nifty new features for folks who'd bought vehicles equipped with Tesla's Autopilot 2 hardware. Over the weekend, Tesla published yet another Autopilot update, bringing even more bells and whistles to later-model Tesla vehicles...Read More»

Since Tesla Autopilot debuted in the fall of 2015, it's earned plenty of fans and foes. The former love the safety and convenience offered by the semi-self-driving system, while the latter complain that Tesla foisted dangerous beta software on owners who didn't ask for it. This week, Autopilot...Read More»

Yesterday, Tesla slipped past General Motors to become America's most highly valued automaker. Now, GM says that it's planning to equip one of its luxury sedans, the Cadillac CT6, with "the industry’s first true hands-free driving technology"--a not-so-subtle jab at Tesla's well-known...Read More»

Tesla Autopilot has had plenty of critics since it rolled out to Model S and Model X vehicles in October 2015 as part of an over-the-air update of the company's 7.0 software. Many owners cheered the arrival of semi-self-driving features, but safety advocates and more than a few politicians...Read More»

Self-driving cars are going to ruin everything--in a good way. If all goes as planned, they'll dramatically reduce auto accidents and highway fatalities; boost fuel efficiency; minimize traffic jams; and maybe even cut the number of vehicles we own. Autonomous vehicles are likely to wreak havoc on...Read More»

Google's self-driving car project--now known as Waymo--has put plenty of miles on the odometer. In fact, since 2009, the company's autonomous fleet has traveled 2.3 million miles without assistance from their human companions. All that work is paying big dividends, according to new data from the...Read More»

Last week, Volkswagen and Takata reached major settlements with the U.S. government over their respective misdeeds, and many suggest that the timing--coming one week before the swearing in of Donald Trump as president--was no coincidence. By most accounts, the companies wanted to finalize those...Read More»

Tesla CEO Elon Musk waded into Donald Trump territory yesterday. He didn't get a new hairdo, succumb to bouts of sniffling, or get caught praising the Pontiac Aztec on a hot-mic recording from 2005. (Though if anyone has access to that last one, we'd love a copy.) Instead, Musk, like Trump...Read More»

Tesla is under fire again for its semi-autonomous Autopilot software, and once again, the critics are German regulators. This go-round, officials want the automaker to stop using the term "Autopilot" because they feel that it can mislead consumers into thinking that Teslas can drive themselves...Read More»

In the year since Tesla Autopilot debuted, it's acquired plenty of fans and foes. In the former column, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, hackers, and this guy. In the latter, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Transportation Safety Board, and Germany. Germany's Federal Highway Research...Read More»

For several months, Tesla has been promising to update Autopilot, its semi-autonomous driving software. Over the weekend, Tesla confirmed some of the speculation surrounding Autopilot 8.0 and put other rumors to rest. The company did so via a blog post, which revealed right off the bat that the new...Read More»

Some people can't resist putting themselves in danger. Those folks have given us some amazing things, like bungee-jumping and scuba diving. On the other hand, they're also responsible for Russian roulette and planking. When Tesla rolled out its semi-self-driving Autopilot software last fall, we saw...Read More»

We've spent a lot of time writing about (1) self-driving cars and (2) ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft. There's a very good reason for that: those trends are poised to have a massive impact on the auto industry and dramatically change the way we get around. Initially, the leaders in those...Read More»

Update: see below Over the weekend, Tesla Motors tidied up its Chinese-language website. Although the company says that the edits have been in the works for a while, the timing is a bit suspicious. That's because the changes appear to come in response to a recent fender-bender in Beijing that...Read More»

The past several months have been a roller coaster for Tesla, full of ups (e.g. the debut of the upcoming Model 3) and downs (e.g. ho-hum responses to CEO Elon Musk's "Master Plan Part Deux"). Unfortunately for Tesla fans, it's time for another down moment: the automaker has confirmed another crash...Read More»