Tesla Motors says all cars under production - including the upcoming, low-cost Model 3 -are being outfitted with all of the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a "safety level substantially greater than that of a human driver".

Even though the vehicles will have cameras and sensors and radar and doohickeys, it will be some time before the cars become fully autonomous.  Elon Musk said Tesla spent a year testing the new hardware, and his goal is to do "a demonstration drive of full autonomy from LA to New York by the end of next year".

Controlling all of this will be "basically a supercomputer in a car" making the hardware capable of performing 12 trillion operations per second.  Older cars built before all of the new kit would receive a performance upgrade, although they wouldn't be capable of all that the news cars are graced with.  Musk says it will still be up to regulators and the public to decide when self-driving vehicles could actually be used on the roads. 

Tesla's Autopilot feature suffered a setback in May when a US man was killed driving a Tesla Model S while using the Autopilot function.  Safety investigators found the driver had been speeding moments before the car mistook a white big rig truck for the sky, and passed under it sheering off the top of the car and decapitating the driver.