This Week in Tesla - Tesla Pickup Unveil Date Announced, Autopilot Improvements

Tesla ‘Cybertruck’ Unveil Date Announced

After months of waiting, Tesla supporters worldwide were delighted when on Wednesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced that the new “Cybertruck” will be unveiled on November 21...

With a mere two weeks until the event reportedly will occur in Los Angeles “somewhere near the SpaceX rocket factory”, almost no information has been released about the design or specs. The event will most likely occur at the Tesla Design Studio which is located close to SpaceX’s rocket factory.

With the Model Y coming this summer and the pickup expected to arrive in around a year or two, Tesla will have made an entrance into the two largest car markets in the US. Of the few nuggets of information that has been released, there is one main point that all should definitely know going into the event: Elon has consistently said that he is the most excited for the pickup in comparison to all of the other great upcoming Tesla products. Everyone knows how hard of a worker Elon is and if he really wants this to be a great product, it will be.

The release date, nickname, and design of the truck were all inspired by Blade Runner. The “Cyberpunk” name is a reference to a truck in the movie which Tesla’s truck has supposedly been inspired by. The November 21st release date is another Blade Runner reference, as the movie takes place during November of 2019 in Los Angeles. It is a daunting task to convince the millions upon millions of Americans who own pickup trucks to switch to an electric version, but if there is one thing Tesla does, it is deliver.

New Autopilot Update Recognizes Traffic Cones

Tesla owners received another update this week in a series of constant improvements coming to the fleet of cars. This new update gives the cars the ability to recognize traffic cones, something that has been needed for a while. Prior to this update, one would be using the autopilot system on the highway, and have to tell the system to either switch lanes, or disengage the system altogether to avoid traffic cones. Now, even when using “Smart Summon” the cars will recognize all traffic cones, even if it is just a single cone that’s not on the road! Hopefully, all of these small, almost weekly updates continue and eventually lead to automatic city street driving as well as traffic light recognition.

One area of concern for autonomous driving experts as well as AI and autonomous driving software engineers, is that the computer will have to make the decision to either proceed or stop on a yellow light. This requires calculating the distance as well as the risk associated with being in the intersection on a red light even if it is not for long. The obvious answer here would be to always stop on a yellow light, however it will not be so easy to program the decision making of the computer in those situations. Tesla though, has shown historically that it’s up to tackling challenges nobody else is up to.

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