The tech elite from Silicon Valley describe "big data" as the "new oil" in the virtual web. It's always there in everyone's behavior, waiting to be tapped. And whoever can be the first to dig out this "crude oil" and refine and utilize it will be the master of the next era.

Elon Musk, who has been working in the field of AI for many years, is naturally aware of this, and Tesla is not just an electric car company for him, and building cars and selling them is just a knock on the door. Layout of the three electric industries, that is, relying on car building to get through the core technology of batteries, electronic control and motors, is his further planning. Collecting driving data from Tesla users using Autopilot and upgrading to Level 5 Autopilot through AI learning is the ultimate goal.

So we can understand why Tesla has cut its prices, why Musk attaches so much importance to cost control, why Tesla's design pioneered a minimalist style, and why the workmanship and materials are rougher compared with gasoline cars in the same price range. It's that Musk needs a lot of Tesla cars on the road to mine as much "data crude" as possible for Autopilot while pursuing corporate profits.

According to Tesla, Autopilot 1.0 has been available since 2014, and includes

1 front camera

12 ultrasonic sensors

1 front radar

1 rear reversing camera (which doesn't take part in Autopilot)

processing chips: NVIDIA?Tegra?3/?Mobileye?Q3

And post-2016 Autopilot?2.0 is upgraded to

3 front cameras (wide-angle, telephoto, and medium-range)

2 side cameras

3 rear cameras

12 ultrasonic sensors (sensing distance doubled)

1 front radar (enhanced)

1 rear reversing camera

Processing chip: NVIDIA?Drive?PX?2 (40x?Autopilot?1.0?processing speed)

2019 then sees the release of the latest Autopilot?3.0, which mainly replaces the

By January 2020, Tesla had collected more than 2 billion miles of driving data, compared to its strongest rival, Google Waymo, which had only collected 20 million miles of driving data. Virtually all Tesla vehicles with Autopilot hardware (whether Autopilot is enabled or not) send driving data to the cloud. Based on such a huge amount of data, Tesla AI can learn amidst a variety of real-world complex road conditions and different driver behaviors to prepare for Level 3 and even Level 5 Autopilot.

While traditional car companies are still racking their brains to advertise and downsize their cars, designing and building them on a large scale to cut costs and stay competitive in selling them, tech companies like Tesla, Google, and Uber are focusing on autonomous driving. By then cars may not need to be owned, but rather driverless cars can be summoned with the click of an app on your phone. Faced with such a trillion-dollar market, as disruptive companies do, Tesla is trying to build its own chips, its own hardware, and its own software, of which building cars is only a small part.

There's no doubt that Tesla's game-changing tool in the automotive industry is data.

This article comes from the author of Automotive Home Car, and does not represent the viewpoint position of Automotive Home.