Tesla takes one giant step towards driverless cars overnight

Judging by the way Silicon Valley giants like Google and Apple are jumping into the automotive space with their visions of fully autonomous vehicles, it is only a matter of time before us humans take a backseat, quite literally, on the road. However, Tesla Motors, the fully-electric carmaker and the brainchild of real-life Tony Stark, Elon Musk, is already a step ahead of the curve. In addition to having hundreds of thousands of its cars already on the road – compared to its counterparts which are still in various stages of R&D – Tesla also has the benefit of pushing out updates to cars already sold, over the air, just as you’d receive a newer version of your phone’s operating system from your smartphone manufacturer. 

Thanks to the latter, Tesla can now claim its position in history as the first production car to introduce a driverless mode. Today, it released a software update to some of its Model S and Model X fleet with four features for autonomous driving smarts. You might remember that a year ago, Tesla introduced autopilot hardware to its newest Model S vehicles — digital cameras, radar and sonar that map a car’s surroundings and equip it to drive itself. Now, the new software unlocks that potential for those cars as well as Tesla’s new Model X SUV launched last month.

“This is going to be quite a profound experience,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk told reporters on Wednesday. Several hundred drivers — and Musk himself, apparently — have been testing the feature for about a month.

“When I put friends of mine in the car and they see the car drive, they’re blown away,” he said. “I think it’s going to change people’s perception of the future quite rapidly.”

There’s a catch, though, and you might have been expecting it to drop anytime now: you can’t exactly nap in the back while being chauffeured around in beautiful, electric silence with this update. The reason will become clearer when we tell you what Tesla has named its driverless feature. It is called “Autopilot.” Yes, like the one on planes. 

And it works in pretty much the same way too. Like airplane pilots with takeoffs and landings, the driver will still be expected to handle much of the subtle and strange ballet that is modern driving. The human will still have to keep her hands on the wheel every few seconds, as a safety measure, and to meet state laws that demand a hand on the wheel. For its part, the car will manage lane-keeping, mind the gap to the car in front and behind, and handle much of the braking and acceleration.

“We’re advising drivers to keep their hands on the wheel. The software — it’s very new,” Musk said, adding, “In the long term, people won’t need hands on the wheel. And eventually there won’t be wheels.”

That eventuality could be within three years for Tesla, tech-wise, Musk said. However, he noted that regulatory hurdles will push it longer, reiterating what he told an audience last week.