On April 13, a Tesla owner asked Musk on Twitter whether the maximum speed limit of an electric car equipped with Tesla's autopilot system could be raised from 80 miles per hour to 85 miles or 90 miles per hour. Musk replied to the netizen that "soon."
This means that Tesla's electric vehicles, which currently use a pure visual Autopilot system, will have a maximum speed limit of more than 80 miles per hour (about 129 km/h). If it can meet the same standards as the car-mounted radar model, the speed may be close to 145km/h, and it will take off at real speed.
It is understood that some models of Tesla before 2021, its Autopilot automatic driving system is composed of on-board radar and cameras, which is safer than the current pure vision system. But starting in 2021, Tesla announced that its electric vehicles will no longer be equipped with any on-board radar, relying only on camera-only vision image systems and neural network processors to achieve autopilot and FSD and other self-driving system functions.
Tesla's operation of no longer using radar has caused a large number of consumers to be dissatisfied, and many people think that Musk is cutting corners and saving costs. But Musk has vowed that pure vision systems can achieve the same level of safety as radar systems, and their driving technology is even better than that of human drivers. From some data point of view, the pure vision system and the system with vehicle radar are indeed comparable, and there is a high degree of safety.
However, there are still big differences between the two. Models equipped with on-board radar can still activate the radar sensor, and the maximum speed of the automatic driving system is 145 km/h, and the following distance can be set to one parking space. The automatic driving system based on pure vision has a maximum speed of 120km/h, and the distance with the car must be two parking spaces, which is not a small gap compared with the former.
Musk said that he wanted to increase the maximum speed limit of pure visual self-driving systems, but did not indicate the exact time, which may require weeks, months or even longer. Although Musk is very confident in the pure visual self-driving system, increasing the speed of the car will inevitably increase the safety hazards, and Tesla should not update this feature so quickly until it has undergone sufficient safety testing.
Many netizens joked that car companies always call themselves "automatic driving systems" when they advertise, and once an accident occurs, they will change their mouths to "assisted driving systems", and drivers must interfere with control. Nowadays, the newly launched models are basically equipped with auxiliary driving functions, but everyone still needs to concentrate and hold the steering wheel when driving, in order to avoid accidents.