Featured Image Credit: Diamon View Studios/YouTube
The Tesla Model 3 and its Autopilot system were recently featured in an epic teaser from Diamond View, an Emmy Award-Winning video agency that is currently working on a documentary about the future of transportation in Tampa, Florida. The brief teaser provides a glimpse at Tesla and its upcoming Robotaxi service, which utilizes autonomous vehicles to take passengers from Point A to Point B.
News about Diamond View’s project initially broke in the electric vehicle community last March when reports emerged that the group was filming a group of Teslas on the Selmon Expressway. Blaine Johnston, a Tesla Model 3 owner who volunteered for the project, noted in a Reddit post that the vehicles are being used for an upcoming documentary. Johnston hinted that the production was pretty big, with the filmmakers using drones, camera trucks, and boom cameras.
The Tesla owner added that Diamond View had posted on a local Facebook page that they were looking for Model 3s that can be used for a video shoot. Him and several other Tesla owners volunteered, and their vehicles were filmed during the middle of the day on a Tuesday to avoid rush hour traffic. The preview that was recently shared on YouTube showed the cars seemingly driving autonomously, but Johnston noted that they mostly just used basic Autopilot’s Traffic-Aware Cruise Control (TACC) and Autosteer during filming.
The short preview of the Model 3 fleet that Diamond View posted on YouTube provided a glimpse of how autonomous Teslas could operate in the future. While the vehicles in the film are not autonomous just yet, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has stated that the company’s cars have the necessary hardware that would allow them to achieve full self-driving abilities in the future. This is one of the reasons why last year, Musk noted that Tesla is on track to have about a million Robotaxi-capable vehicles by the end of 2020.
For Robotaxis to be real, Tesla would have to master and refine several aspects of its FSD system. Among the most important is inner-city driving, which is incredibly complex due to the subtleties of daily driving behavior. Tesla has made a lot of headway in this light, with the company recently releasing valuable features such as Traffic Light and Stop Sign Control, a key component for inner-city full self-driving.
As for Diamond View’s project, the filmmaking group could not have chosen a better set of vehicles for its shoot. The Tesla Model 3 is arguably one of the most technologically-advanced cars available to consumers today, and it is something that would likely become more ubiquitous over time. This means that the sight of fleets of autonomous Teslas, as suggested in Diamond View’s preview, will likely be a common sight sooner than we expect.
About the Author
Ma. Claribelle Deveza
Longtime writer and news/book editor. Writing about Tesla allows me to contribute something good to the world, while doing something I love.
