[Hatman]

Elon Musk on his forthcoming 'autopilot' feature, and on Google's autonomous car:


Stuff meets Elon Musk
http://www.stuff.tv/tesla/stuff-meets-elon-musk/feature

Telsa plans to follow the Model S with something more affordable. The next car after the Model X will be “mass-market”: “we’re aiming for 20% smaller and half the price, and it’ll be coming to market in about two and a half years.” And it'll be self-driving, too, using Tesla’s AutoPilot technology. “Autonomous driving will get rolled out into cars quite rapidly, in the next year or so. We want to get to the point where you can go from highway on-ramp to highway off-ramp completely autonomously, without touching any controls, in the next 12 months.”

So what does he make of Google’s self-driving, er, ‘car’?

“It’s not the most attractive thing. I haven’t seen it in person, but it’s only going to go 25mph, and it has two feet of foam bumper on the front. I’m not sure if it’s sending quite the right message. I hope they put an ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button on the dash, which you can press and it’ll just go somewhere.” Tesla’s self-driving auto, he reassures us, is “not going to be some weird-looking thing. It’s going to be the car that you see now. The radar will be hidden inside the bumpers - the bumpers are plastic, so the radar can see through it - and the cameras are packaged into quite a small space, where the mirror is. If you look for them, you’ll be able to find them, but otherwise you won’t notice it.”