Tesla begins first phase of Enhanced Autopilot software

Tesla owners are receiving some cutting edge technological features in their electric cars, with the company rolling out the first phase of its Enhanced Autopilot system.

The new Enhanced Autopilot initiative provides Tesla owners with some new abilities: Traffic Aware Cruise Control, Forward Collision Warning, and Autosteer. Musk tweeted over the weekend that the Autosteer feature will keep your car in the lane, but is capped to 45mph.

Autosteer works together with Traffic Aware Cruise Control "so the car can drive on highways in stop-and-go traffic", reports Business Insider. They continue: "Forward Collision Warning will alert drivers of a potential impact with an upcoming obstacle, but there is no emergency braking to actually stop the car, so the onus is on the driver".

New versions of Autopilot will be released over-the-air to Tesla vehicles every 2-6 weeks, with a future update to unlock the Autosteer speeds from 45mph, to something higher.

The aim of Enhanced Autopilot is to provide the ability of your car changing lanes on its own, merging on and off highways, and even the most convenient of them all - parking itself. The company is also planning improvements on its Summon feature, so that "the car can maneuver around a more complex environment to find you", BI continued.

The new second-generation hardware suite inside of the cars has 8 cameras, but the new Enhanced Autopilot is only using 4 of them. Inside, there's 8 cameras total, a single radar sensor, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and NVIDIA's impressive Drive PX2 - an on-board computing system, the brain of the car.