Elon Musk Says Autopilot 8.0 Update Makes 3D Picture Of Environment To Assess Probability Of Collision

Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk has finally revealed the four-one-one on the version 8.0 of his car's Autopilot feature, and it appears that the software update will be one that could really prevent fatal collisions. On Sunday, the business magnate officially published his highly anticipated blog post, which per previous reports should detail how the Autopilot 8.0 update works. In his post, Musk confirmed that with the software update, Autopilot will primarily make use of the onboard radar that was added to Tesla cars as part of the hardware suite launched in October 2014. Instead of acting as a supplementary sensor to the cars' camera and image processing system, the radar has been enhanced to be used as the primary control sensor that recognizes objects without the need to confirm their existence using the built-in camera. Musk says in his post that what the radar does is take snapshots of the environment every tenth of a second and these snapshots are assembled to produce a 3D picture of the world, since relying on just a single frame would make it difficult for the sensor to identify moving objects from stationary objects.