Motorist Dakota Randall from Massachusetts captured a Tesla driver fast asleep behind the wheel while cruising on autopilot at 60mph. Even more bizarre is that the passenger sitting next to him also appears to be sleeping and has their head rested on the safety belt. Tesla Autopilot is essentially an advanced driver-assistance system with lane centering, adaptive cruise control, self-parking, automatic lane changes, and the ability to summon the car to and from a garage or parking spot. Read more for the video and additional information.
Tesla’s Hardware 3.0 (Full Self Driving) includes a custom Tesla-designed processor using application-specific integrated-circuit (ASIC) chips that can process 2,300 frames per second, which is a 21x improvement in image processing compared to its predecessor. The company confirmed that 3.0 was necessary for “full self-driving”, but not for “enhanced Autopilot” functions. It’s powered by 12x ARM Cortex-A72 CPUs @ 2.2GHz and a Mali GPU @ 1GHz.
“At no point did I feel I was in danger until after the fact, when I thought ‘Wow, I was just driving next to somebody who was completely asleep on the Mass Pike of all places, like one of the most dangerous roads I can imagine.’ But yeah, the car stayed the same speed in the same way on the highway, and yeah, it didn’t change at all. It was weird,” said Randall.