A Tesla Semi was spotted cruising down the highway with a prominent sensor array mounted atop its sleek vehicle. The automaker had long maintained a silence on the autonomous driving capabilities of its commercial vans.
At Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this month, CEO Elon Musk announced that the company had finally approved its long-overdue plan to transition the Tesla Semi electric Class 8 tractor-trailer into volume production.
Since the Tesla Semi’s debut in 2017, the company has maintained a discreet silence regarding the electric truck’s autonomous driving features.
Tesla has consistently maintained that every vehicle produced since 2016 comes equipped with all necessary hardware to enable self-driving capabilities through software updates, while the Tesla Semi was spotted featuring cameras throughout its vehicle.
As a Tesla Semi rolled onto the scene, a novel array of sensors gleamed in the light.
The apparent similarity to lidar sensors suggests that they may indeed share some common characteristics.
While Tesla does not employ lidar sensors in its autonomous driving systems, the company has leveraged these technologies to validate and “ground-truth” its proprietary methods.
As the data suggests, there’s a distinct possibility that Tesla is refining its supervised autonomous driving capabilities for its electric Class 8 trucks, rendering this development both intriguing and potentially groundbreaking.
