Thirteen years ago in Silicon Valley, a company was born. Its name was Tesla. One simple goal of this company was to prove that electric cars could be better in every way over the traditional fuel powered cars.
Since then, Tesla led by Elon Musk has become a household name in the automotive industry, especially when it comes to manufacturing electric cars. They are said to be the pioneer in manufacturing electric cars but they were not the first one to make electric cars. What they did first was to create a large consumer base who would want to try out a new technology and Tesla did not let their car owners down. Tesla was also not the first company to make a driverless car, but they were a pioneer in using big data to do that.
Tesla since its inception has made it their policy to collect all possible data from their car owners. This data is sent to the cloud for analysis with algorithms and software. All these data has helped them to grow and modify their system in every aspect which has made them one of the strongest contender in the car manufacturing industry.
Tesla provides Over the Air service
Tesla offered their customer of new sedan model an optional “Tech package” in October 2014 for an additional $4250. This package included cameras and sensors which would warn the drivers about any accident beforehand. However, Tesla was also gathering data from the drivers using those sensors. Tesla gathered data for a year, then, in October 2015, each of Tesla’s 60,000 sedan owners received an Over the Air (OTA) update which enabled their car to drive itself. The amusing thing is that the drivers did not even know that their cars were getting an update on an autopilot function before it happened.
Tesla did this before as well, in 2014 they provided an OTA solution for overheating to their 30000 owners, which reduced the power fluctuation automatically.
Responding to issues using their data is what make Tesla unique. Tesla made a stated very confidently that they are a software company as much as they are into hardware.
Tesla’s data-center-driven car could be tracked from their data center and could be monitored who is implementing new software and when. This gives them the opportunity to fix any issues remotely.
Tesla is concerned about customer satisfaction
Tesla not only uses big data to fix the problems they are also using this to enhance customer’s satisfaction as well. They gather data from the online forum of their customers and they use this to improve their next production. No other company has this kind of a relationship with their customers.
Tesla’s roadmap for auto-driven car
According to Tesla, they have gathered data from over 100 million miles with their autopilot software. This data are being compiled in the cloud to generate road maps for driverless cars which Tesla claims are 100 times more accurate than any standard navigation system.
Tesla may sell this data to other car companies in future or may upload it to the cloud for the government to use to make the road safer.
Tesla announced in January that they are working on their own AI hardware. Mr. Musk has also mentioned that with the amount of data already gathered, he believes that all Tesla cars will be fully autonomous (level 5 autonomy) by 2019.
There is no doubt that Tesla is pushing its competitors to the wall to be the first to launch a fully autonomous driverless car and it has left the others far behind in the department of data-gathering.