Tesla Owners Have Driven More Than 100 Million Miles Using Autopilot

Tesla owners have driven more than 100 million miles using the auto maker’s Autopilot feature.

Tesla drivers put in 2.6 million miles on Autopilot per day — far more than Google’s self-driving cars, which have logged 1.5 million miles during their entire existence, according to Sterling Anderson, Tesla’s director of Autopilot programs, speaking Tuesday at the EmTech Digital conference in San Francisco. Tesla currently has 70,000 cars on the road with Autopilot, according to the Verge.

The Palo Alto-based electric car company unveiled limited self-driving capabilities last October with features like auto steer, traffic-aware cruise control, auto park and auto lane change. The vehicles use a unique combination of cameras, radar, ultrasonic sensors and data, and continually improve performance based on experience.

Tesla’s vehicles don’t quite reach Google car independence, however. Tesla drivers can engage a highway setting that allows them to take their hands off the wheel, but the driver needs to remain vigilant.

“It [Autopilot] should be used with a driver fully engaged, fully in the loop, using their cognitive abilities as they normally would,” Anderson said at the conference, per the Verge. “You should say, ‘I need to stay very in tune with the set of scenarios my car doesn’t handle well, I should be very engaged.'”

And the warnings to Tesla drivers aren’t without merit. It wasn’t long after the launch of the Autopilot features that two videos were uploaded to YouTube showing Tesla drivers behaving badly. The first video shows a Tesla Model S jerk to the right as the driver turns off a highway, almost taking the driver off the single-track road and into a bush. The second video shows a Model S auto-steering into oncoming traffic, veering away as another car passes in the opposite direction. Earlier this week, a video was posted of a driver reportedly sleeping at the wheel while Tesla’s Autopilot did the driving, according to Mashable.

Reckless drivers aside, the company is moving forward with the technology. CEO Elon Musk predicted back in December that Tesla will have a self-driving car within two years.

“I think we have all the pieces,” Musk told Fortune, “and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments—and then we’re done. It’s a much easier problem than people think it is.”

Source: Silicon Valley Business Journal, Gina Hall
Photo: An employee drives a Tesla Motors Inc. Model S electric automobile, equipped with Autopilot hardware and software, hands-free on a highway in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on Oct. 27. Tesla started equipping the Model S with hardware — radar, a forward-looking camera, 12 long-range sensors, GPS — to enable the autopilot features about a year earlier. (Jasper Juinen/Bloomberg)