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Tesla's Autopilot shakeup comes at a crucial time for the company (TSLA)
BI Intelligence
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Tesla is shaking up the top of its Autopilot unit, responsible for developing its autonomous systems, reports Business Insider.
The company is parting ways with Chris Lattner, the former Apple developer and key figure in the creation of the Swift programming language, who joined in January. It named Andrej Karpathy as its new head of AI and Autopilot Vision.
This change of course comes as Tesla deals with some challenges in its development of Autopilot.
After a fatal crash involving a vehicle that had Autopilot engaged last summer, Tesla and computer vision technology supplier Mobileye terminated their contract and the automaker began to develop sensors for the Autopilot system in-house.
The change in technology, starting with vehicles produced in October 2016, meant that newer vehicles were actually equipped with a less capable Autopilot system than older vehicles. Tesla is bringing those newer vehicles to feature-parity through a series of over-the-air updates that incrementally augment the semi-autonomous system.
The transition has also been challenging internally and to the car’s capabilities. CEO Elon Musk told shareholders that the redeveloped Autopilot system is only just now on par with the Mobileye-based version, and talked about the challenges and difficulties the development team faced in incorporating a new package of sensors with different strengths and weaknesses.
Tesla has ambitious plans for its new vehicles and the Autopilot unit. Musk has stated that one goal is to produce half a million vehicles annually starting in 2018 — more than six times as many as it made in 2016. The automaker is already ramping up battery production in anticipation of the release of its Model 3 mass-market sedan.
And it plans to make software enabling fully autonomous control of these vehicles available in or around 2019, with a demonstration of this tech coming in a coast-to-coast autonomous trip across the US toward the end of 2017. Autopilot’s continued improvement is critical to Tesla’s long-term goal of transforming the auto industry, and a leadership shakeup amid these issue could point to either stabilization or further turmoil.
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