Tesla Will Use Regular Employees To Test New Autopilot Tech

The trade-off is that they have to agree to provide 300 to 400 hours of driving data and feedback to Tesla’s Autopilot development team by the end of the year. Bloomberg claims the program is linked to rolling out full self-driving capabilities. Considering it’s a savings of $13,000—and taking into account the traffic on I-880—it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.

Back in October of 2016, Tesla announced that every new model would ship to customers with the hardware required for its future fully-developed self-driving technology, but the company has yet to “unlock” the feature as it continues its testing. Instead, customers who have paid to unlock the option use the limited self-driving technology that is available in the current version of Autopilot.

Details of the program are limited and Tesla declined to comment when reached by Jalopnik, but considering Tesla already has access to the data being collected by customer cars already on the road, this new employee incentive program must involve a higher level of data sharing and perhaps even a more extreme and controlling version of Autopilot. That is, for these workers that would mean less privacy, more risk, or both. It’s not clear if Tesla has been granted any permission for advanced testing on public roads.