With almost no human involvement, an amazing time-lapse video recorded a self-driving Tesla traveling from Los Angeles to Silicon Valley.
During emergencies, the Tesla Model 3 Performance’s 358-mile drive had a backup human driver to take over and charge the car along the way.
Compressed into a 15-minute clip by Tesla enthusiast and YouTuber Whole Mars Catalog (WMC), who took the six-hour ride.
He said the fact there was no intervention proved ‘that this is more than just luck.’
‘The software is getting better,’ he added.
WMC explained that he had to stop just once to charge the car in Kettleman City, about halfway through his trek.
The video shows the driver’s view of the Tesla Model 3 updated to the 380-mile trip with experimental Maximum Self-Driving technology.
The WMC video began at the Hawthorne headquarters of SpaceX and rode to San Jose to make only one stop at a charging station.
‘The fact that it made it all the way down to Los Angeles and then back up with zero intervention suggests that this is more than just luck,’ the video caption reads.
‘The software is getting better. This drive was even better than the last one, although there were still many mistakes and areas for improvement that didn’t require a disengagement.’
However, it was not a truly driverless trek: you can see the human owner in the video taking charge to avoid some debris on the road and charging the car along the way.
A small number of owners of Tesla have been invited to test the technology and share the results of using the new system.
FSD was introduced in October as an ‘advanced driver assistance system’ using external cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors, and a powerful on-board computer to manage traffic barriers such as vehicles.
Source: Whole Mars Catalog, Daily Mail