Tesla launches Autopilot

In October 2015, Tesla pushed an over-the-air update that switched on Autopilot across its fleet overnight — automated steering, lane-keeping, and traffic-aware cruise control delivered as software to cars people already owned. It was a striking demonstration of the over-the-air model: existing vehicles became meaningfully more capable without a trip to the dealer.

Autopilot put advanced driver assistance into the hands of ordinary drivers years ahead of most rivals and generated an enormous real-world dataset that Tesla uses to keep improving its systems. Tesla's own quarterly safety reports have consistently shown fewer crashes per mile with Autopilot engaged than without — though, as Tesla notes, the comparison has caveats since Autopilot is used mostly on highways.

Autopilot laid the groundwork for Tesla's Full Self-Driving program and its broader bet that the car of the future is a robot guided by cameras and neural networks.