New Tesla Autopilot Update Increases Speed Limit, Adds Side Collision Warning: Report

Tesla pushed out a new update to its second-generation (HW2) hardware Sunday. According to a report, owners of Tesla HW2 models started receiving the update over the weekend.

Electrek cited the company’s release notes for the update, “In general, you must be traveling at least 18 mph to engage Autosteer. When a vehicle is detected in front of you, you can engage Autosteer if you are traveling at least 5 mph, or if you’re already using cruise control. In this release, Autosteer is available only below 50 mph. Once you’ve exceeded this speed, Autosteer will no longer be available.”

The Autopilot update brings two major changes to HW2 hardware — it lifts the speed restriction on the cars’ Autosteer feature from 45 miles per hour to 50 miles per hour and adds a new feature called Side Collision Warning.

Change in speed

While the change in speed is significant, first-generation Tesla owners will have more speed control as they would still remain free to clock top speeds. In HW2 vehicles, the company is trying create a system which controls the cars’ speeds to ensure safety, based on data accumulated from HW2 cars.

Side Collision Warning

Side Collision Warning is a safety feature added by the new update. It assists Tesla owners in changing lanes safely. When HW2 cars travelling between the speeds of 7-85 miles per hour and detect an object close to their sides, lines of light will radiate from the car’s image in the instrument panel.

The feature was present on first-generation Teslas, but has only been added by the current update to HW2 models.

Tesla started rolling out the HW2 update to all models on Jan. 22, 2017 to all cars built after October 2016. One of the features that it brought to Teslas was Autosteer which uses the car’s Traffic Aware Cruise Control system to control its speed.