DETROIT — Despite federal safety investigations of Tesla’s self-driving cars, the company’s chief executive, Elon Musk, is hardly backing off on his grand plans for autonomous vehicles.
In a blog post late Wednesday, Mr. Musk updated Tesla’s “master plan” with a pledge to expand beyond electric cars into battery-powered pickups, semitrucks and buses, and to equip them with advanced self-driving systems.
He
made no mention of the fatal May 7 accident involving a Tesla Model S
with its Autopilot system engaged, or of the federal scrutiny of the
technology. A criticism of that system has been that, despite its name,
its collision-avoidance abilities depend on the human driver’s being
ready to immediately retake control of the vehicle in a crisis.
In
his blog post, Mr. Musk indicated that the eventual focus would be on
vehicles that fully drive themselves. And he doubled down on promises to
improve Tesla’s autonomous driving systems, as part of a major
expansion of its product line.
“As
the technology matures, all Tesla vehicles will have the hardware
necessary to be fully self-driving with fail-operational capability,
meaning that any given system could break down and your car will drive
itself safety,” he said in the post.
end partial quote from:
No comments:
Post a Comment