Tesla Now Close to Global Autopilot Systems with 1.3B Miles of Data

Tesla skeptics may be in a run for their money. Tesla is slowing making waves in the industry of automated driving with its more powerful Autopilot hardware. 

With the Tesla Fremont factory, the move of the company to gradually enable level 3 and 4 autonomous driving is a big step toward total self-driving capabilities. Tesla's Autopilot hardware is also starting to grow faster than skeptics could imagine.

According to Electrek, the automobile industry remains skeptical of the company's ability to deliver a full self-driving level 5 system given its hardware suite. However, Tesla remains confident in their abilities with their massive amounts of data. 

Tesla apparently has accumulated about 1.3 billion miles of Autopilot data from its first-generation sensor suite. Almost all of it is useful for the second generation of Autopilot. This is almost a third of at least three billion miles driven by Tesla's fleet of cars.

Of course, to make things clear, those are not miles driven on Autopilot, but miles driven in cars with Autopilot first generation hardware. Tesla still uses the data even if the system is not active to help feed its machine learning system. Autopilot, Enhanced Autopilot, and Full Self-Driving Capability are programs under Tesla that benefit from such a system. 

If we are talking about the actual distance with Autopilot active, then we're talking about approximately 300 million miles. In comparison, Tesla also said it accumulated over 780 million miles driven on hardware-equipped cars, with less than 100 million with active Autopilot back in May.

This means the company increased the total number of miles by over 60 percent in just six months. It also tripled the number of miles with Autopilot active. The first-generation Autopilot fleet is now 100,000 vehicles strong, and Tesla is slowly transitioning to its second-generation hardware.

Tesla's sensor suite has been so far lighter than Google's own self-driving software. Google has accumulated over 3.5 million miles of data (2.2 million of them autonomous) and is adding about 25,000 miles a week with its 50 prototypes.

Tesla, on the other hand, is adding millions of miles every day from its first-gen systems. The company hopes to catch up with Google in terms of data gathering by 2017.