Tesla’s heavily upgraded Autopilot will start rolling out in December

If you recently bought a Model S or Model X, you’ll be happy to know that Tesla’s Enhanced Autopilot support will arrive for you soon.

Elon Musk took to Twitter over the weekend to inform a new Model S owner that the Enhanced Autopilot update will start rolling out in “about three weeks”. That means you should get the update sometime in mid-December.

In October, Tesla announced that all new Tesla cars produced will have heavily upgraded hardware that will give it full autonomous driving capabilities. Tesla said the hardware, which will give its cars a “level of safety substantially greater than that of a human driver”, includes eight cameras placed around the outside of the car to give it 360-degree vision and 12 ultrasonic sensors to detect objects.

• Tesla confirms heavily upgraded Autopilot for all new cars

A new radar system has also been designed for the front of the car to help provide information about the road ahead – whether it be in fog, heavy rain, or even in front of the car ahead. Tesla has designed a new computer to process all this extra information; the new one has nearly 40 times the processing power of the old one. These hardware upgrades will be available on all cars Tesla builds.

@edwardsanchez about three weeks and it will get rolled out incrementally in monthly releases

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 27, 2016

In other words, new cars will have the necessary hardware to drive completely on their own, if you decide to enable the option. This full self-driving hardware suite will cost an additional $8,000 and is capable of level 5 autonomy.

Tesla has said it wants to reach full autonomy through incremental “monthly releases” by late-2017.