Your Tech Story

Tesla’s New Chip will Now Help it Bring Driverless Vehicles on the Roads by 2020

Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, is a visionary and has been working constantly, towards improving the company’s series of self-driven cars. At the Tesla’s Autonomy Investor Day in Palo Alto, California, held on Monday, the company announced a new silicon chip, specifically, built for its self-driving cars, which according to Tesla is “the best chip in the world”.

Tesla in a partnership with Samsung has developed a silicon chip to be installed into the Tesla cars to make them fully self-driven. It is a 260 square millimetre chip having 6 billion transistors, which will be a complete solution for the driver-less cars.

Tesla chip
Image Source: techcrunch.com

While representing the new chip at the event, Musk said, “All cars being produced right now have this computer. All Tesla cars being produced right now have everything necessary for full self-driving. All you have to do is improve the software.”

According to Musk, the chip is being mounted in the Tesla Model S and Model X for over a month now, and for the past ten days the Model 3 cars in manufacturing are also including this very chip in it.

Only a month ago, Musk had mentioned in an interview that Tesla will be bringing the fully-autonomous cars soon, which won’t require a human input to drive. And now, the company has announced this new silicon chip, which, according to the company, is 21 times better than the Nvidia chips that the company has been using in its cars.

The Tesla autonomous cars includes the auto-pilot feature, which still needs the supervision of humans to drive accurately. In the past years, the Tesla cars have seen a few accidents and car crashes, most of which were driving on auto-pilots. So having a new chip that won’t require any of the human inputs is sceptical for many.

This is the first time the company has developed a chip by itself, and Musk too jokingly mentioned the same, saying, “It seems improbable. How could it be that Tesla, who has never designed a chip before, would design the best chip in the world? But that is objectively what has occurred. All Teslas being produced right now have this chip.”

Musk, during the presentation, also said that the company will roll out over a million fully self-driving cars by 2020 with the help of this same new chip.