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Tesla Improves Autopilot Safety by Shifting Primarily to Radars

The improvements, says Tesla CEO Elon Musk, will make his cars “by far” the safest on the road, and would likely have saved the life of Joshua Brown, who died in a crash while using Autopilot.

(TNS) — Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk revealed what he called “dramatic improvements” to the automaker’s Autopilot technology on Sunday, shifting primarily to radar — and not just cameras — to help the car see better and avoid collisions. The announcement follows several Autopilot-related crashes, including a fatal Florida collision in May in which a Tesla Model S driving on Autopilot slammed into a big rig after apparently failing to distinguish between the white truck and the bright sky behind it.

Musk said he believes the improvements will make his cars “by far” the safest on the road and would likely have saved the life of Joshua Brown, who died in the Florida crash.

But Musk cautioned that the Autopilot 8.0 update “does not mean perfect safety,” he said Sunday. “Perfect safety is really an impossible goal.”

The improvements come as the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is investigating the fatal crash and amid criticism that Musk rolled out Autopilot to customers in beta trials before it had been fully tested.

One of the new upgrades is “Autosteer,” which will force drivers to pay attention. The car will repeatedly warn drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel. If those warnings are ignored, the driver will have to park the car to re-engage the self-driving program.

Musk said Sunday that Tesla has shared most of the changes with NHTSA officials, who, according to the chief executive, had a "quite positive" reaction. "They appear very happy with the changes," he told reporters.

The most significant upgrade to Autopilot, Musk said, is relying on the car’s radar to create “a picture of the world.”

The radar was added to Tesla cars in October 2014, but was designed to only supplement the camera and image-processing system.

“After careful consideration, we now believe it can be used as a primary control sensor without requiring the camera to confirm visual image recognition,” Musk said in a blog post published Sunday after the call.

The change is counterintuitive, Musk said, “because of how strange the world looks in radar.”

People, for example, look partially translucent on radar. Something wooden or painted plastic is almost as transparent as glass to radar, he said. Any metallic surface can be amplified on radar to bigger than it really is.

“The big problem in using radar to stop the car is avoiding false alarms,” Musk said in his post. “Slamming on the brakes is critical if you are about to hit something large and solid, but not if you are merely about to run over a soda can. Having lots of unnecessary braking events would at best be very annoying and at worst cause injury.”

Musk said the new software will have more data points as a result of the radar — ‘’a lot more information per object” — and that the radar snapshots would be assembled every tenth of a second to create a 3-D picture.

“By comparing several contiguous frames against vehicle velocity and expected path, the car can tell if something is real and assess the probability of collision,” Musk said in the post.

The software will improve with fleet learning, resulting in a car with Autopilot about three times safer than a normal car, Musk told reporters.

More Teslas on the road — and more miles logged using Autopilot — should improve the technology and safety as more data are collected, Musk said. "This will improve over time," he said.

Prior to the announcement, many analysts who follow Tesla predicted that the company would add more radars and cameras to Autopilot.

The upgraded system “will have to be smarter and more capable of recognizing its surroundings,” Karl Brauer, an analyst at Kelley Blue Book, said in a previous interview with The Times.

The Autopilot feature includes machine steering, collision avoidance, assisted lane changing and adaptive cruise control. On a well-marked highway, the car can nearly drive itself, although the human driver is expected to remain alert and take over the controls when necessary. The system periodically warns drivers to put their hands on the steering wheel, and the car will slow and eventually stop if they don’t.

Times staff writers Charles Fleming and Russ Mitchell contributed to this report.

©2016 the Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.