Elon Musk promises big new Tesla Autopilot upgrade, but is it legal?

Enlarge (credit: https://arstechnica.com/author/aurich-lawson/)

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is famous for the use of his Twitter feed, where he often engages with his almost 24 million followers. Sometimes it gets him in trouble—as with the case of the infamous “420” tweet that landed both him and Tesla with $20 million in fines. Sometimes it gets him dates, as was the case with a bizarre theory involving an artificial intelligence that some people believe will one day torture digital replicas of people who knew about the intelligence but failed to help usher it into existence. (Yes, really.) And sometimes, Musk just uses Twitter to tell the world what his engineers have cooking.

On Sunday evening, a few hours before appearing on 60 Minutes, Musk engaged in the last of these. First, he just wanted to remind owners of the most recent Tesla vehicle about the most recent update, Navigate on Autopilot:

If you have a Tesla built in past 2 years, definitely try Navigate on Autopilot. It will blow your mind. Automatically passes slow cars & takes highway interchanges & off-ramps.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 9, 2018

But then came more momentous news: