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Tesla’s new Lane Departure Avoidance feature will steer owners out of harms way even without Autopilot
Tesla has introduced two new active lane monitoring features designed to help prevent drivers from unintentionally leaving their lane of travel as part of its safety-first mission to reduce vehicle accidents. The two features, named ‘Lane Departure Avoidance’ and ‘Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance’, are derived from Autopilot, yet work while it’s not on, and are being rolled out to all Model S, Model 3, and Model X customers worldwide with vehicles built after October 2016.
The Lane Departure Avoidance feature is an extension of Lane Departure Warning and applies corrective steering to keep drivers in their intended travel lane if a departure is sensed without a turn signal. It also monitors whether a driver’s hands are detected on the wheel and sends a series of reminders and alerts if not, similar to the warnings issued to Autopilot users. Additionally, if Traffic Aware Cruise Control is in use and hands are not detected on the wheel, the car will gradually slow down 15 miles below the speed limit or car’s set speed and turn the hazard lights on. The feature is optional and works between 25 and 90 mph.
Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance is automatically enabled and is designed to return a Tesla vehicle back to its original lane if a departure and an imminent collision are detected. The automatic steering will also come into play if the car is nearing the edge of a road. This version of Lane Departure Avoidance is turned on at the beginning of each drive and can only be turned off via the Autopilot Controls menu for single drives.
Tesla’s safety data indicates that these types of features may be effective for preventing accidents when Autopilot is not in use.
A blog post on Tesla’s recent Lane Departure Autopilot security features was published, a copy of which can be found below:
More Advanced Safety for Tesla Owners
The Tesla Team May 2, 2019
While no car can prevent all accidents, we work every day to make them less likely to occur. The massive amount of real-world data gathered from our cars’ eight cameras, 12 ultrasonic sensors, and forward-facing radar, coupled with billions of miles of inputs from real drivers, helps us better understand the patterns to watch out for in the moments before a crash.
As our quarterly safety reports have shown, drivers using Autopilot register fewer accidents per mile than those driving without it. That’s because Autopilot is designed to reduce fatigue by helping drivers stay in their lane, while also ensuring that they keep their hands on the wheel. While lane-keeping and hands-on monitoring can be extremely effective at helping to reduce the likelihood of an accident when Autopilot is in use, we believe that these precautions can also be extremely effective for preventing accidents when Autopilot is not in use.
Today, we’re introducing two new safety features designed to help prevent drivers from inadvertently departing their lane, which our data shows is a common cause of accidents when Autopilot is not in use. These new features – Lane Departure Avoidance and Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance – help drivers stay engaged and in their lane in order to avoid collisions.
Lane Departure Avoidance
Lane Departure Avoidance lets a driver elect to have corrective steering applied in order to keep them in their intended lane. When the feature is in use and a driver is departing a lane without their turn signal on, the car will also check to see whether a driver’s hands are on the wheel. If a driver’s hands are not detected on the wheel, the driver will receive a series of hands-on reminders and alerts, similar to the ones that our cars provide to customers who use Autopilot. If a drivers’ hands are repeatedly not detected on the wheel when Traffic Aware Cruise Control is in use, their car will gradually slow down to 15 miles below the speed limit or below the car’s set speed, and turn its hazard lights on.
This feature can be turned on or off, and works at speeds between 25 and 90 mph. It is an extension of Lane Departure Warning, which already warns drivers through a steering wheel vibration if they begin to drift out of their lane without their turn signal engaged.
Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance
Emergency Lane Departure Avoidance is designed to steer a Tesla vehicle back into the driving lane if our system detects that it is departing its lane and there could be a collision, or if the car is close to the edge of the road. This feature will automatically be enabled at the beginning of every drive, but can be turned off for a single drive by going to the Autopilot Controls menu.
At Tesla, improving safety is our primary goal, even after a customer purchases their car. That’s why we’re introducing these features beginning today via a free over-the-air software update, starting with Model 3 owners and gradually expanding to all cars that were built after October 2016. This is just another way that we are helping to protect Tesla drivers and passengers, and others on the road, every day.
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said that SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet is its leading competitive advantage in the U.S. airline industry. However, in recent comments, while he described the service as “the biggest competitive advantage” the carrier currently holds, he also acknowledged that the edge is temporary.
“…everybody eventually is going to have high-speed low earth orbit internet connectivity. It’s going to be a must-have. We are going to have a few years of being the only airline that has it at scale, and that’s our mission,” Kirby said. Until everyone has it, United aims to capitalize on its head start by converting trial users into long-term loyal customers.
🚨 United CEO Scott Kirby calls Starlink “the biggest competitive advantage,” but says it’s temporary.
“I think it’s the biggest competitive advantage. And it’s temporary. Like it’s not, everybody eventually is going to have high speed low earth orbit internet connectivity. It’s going to be a must-have. But we are going to have a few years of being the only airline that has it at scale, and that’s our mission.”
“I think we’re going to convince customers that United is the best airline and we’re going to get customers to switch their loyalty, to get our credit card, switch their loyalty to United. Not because of Starlink. They’re going to try us for Starlink and they’re going to stay with all the other technology, and everything else is better, and the technology in particular is so much better than technology other, and it’s accelerating because we’ve got the right tech stack, and because we’re like, our gap is getting wider and wider with our technology every day.”
Next: LAX becomes United’s first 100% Starlink hub in the first half of next year, and the United app will show your Starlink odds for each flight. https://t.co/hToyFWaWj7
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 27, 2026
United has moved faster than its rivals on Starlink installations. As of mid-to-late October 2026, the system was on roughly 43 percent of its fleet, with plans to reach 61 percent by year-end, 87 percent by June 2027, and full fleet coverage by the end of next year.
The airline already operates more Starlink-equipped flights than the rest of the U.S. industry combined. Los Angeles International Airport is scheduled to become United’s first 100 percent Starlink hub in the first half of 2027, and the carrier’s app will display the likelihood that any given flight has the service.
Kirby has pointed to early evidence that the offering influences booking decisions. Some passengers loyal to other airlines are already switching flights for Starlink connectivity, something the airline, along with American Airlines, has tried to leverage against competing airlines. Both companies used status-match programs, and some of those customers are pursuing company-specific credit cards, which signals an intent to stay.
Once onboard, these customers encounter the airline’s broader investments in aircraft, larger seat-back screens, oversized bins, connection tools, and a mobile app that Kirby says outperforms competitors. Wi-Fi satisfaction scores on Starlink-equipped planes have been reported to be nearly double those on aircraft with other systems.
Competitors are moving slowly to do the same. Southwest Airlines began installations in 2025 and expects to complete them soon. Delta is pursuing Amazon’s Leo system, while American expects to start Starlink work in early 2027 and has not yet detailed regional-fleet plans. This timeline gap gives United a multi-year window in which it remains the only major U.S. carrier offering Starlink at scale.
Kirby has framed the strategy as pressing that advantage while simultaneously widening gaps in other technology areas so that customers who try United for the Wi-Fi remain for the overall experience.
The approach reflects a calculated bet that superior in-flight connectivity can accelerate share gains and support longer-term financial targets, including a 10 percent pre-tax margin goal.
High-speed internet is particularly valued by premium and business travelers who can work or stream reliably. As low-Earth-orbit service becomes ubiquitous, the temporary nature of the pure connectivity edge means United’s retention will depend on whether its other product and operational improvements keep pace.
Tesla Cybercab skips the traditional paint shop entirely, marking an unorthodox process for coloring the fully autonomous vehicle. However, the decision was a smart one, as it slashed factory costs, floor space utilization, and complexity, since Tesla relied on specialized alloys and in-mold coloring.
Munro Live was given the opportunity to do a factory walkthrough with Tesla Vice President of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy, who explained and detailed how Cybercab production at Giga Texas eliminates one of the automotive manufacturing industry’s most expensive and space-hungry elements.
A conventional paint line can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and require a million man-hours to build. Moravy framed the choice around Tesla’s core rule: “Question the requirements: why do you need paint?”
🚨 Super cool quote from the Cybercab breakdown on the decision to avoid traditional paint:
“One of the most expensive parts of the factory is a paint line… a few hundred million dollars, a million man hours to build one… rule number one at Tesla, question the requirements. Why do you need paint?… the alloys we use in the castings… don’t oxidize and reduce strength over time.” -@larsmoravy
Model Y and Cybertruck bodies are fully coated and painted. On Cybercab, only the side pieces get the anti-corrosion dip coat, and there’s no paint shop at all, which helps cut factory floor space per car by about 50%.
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 26, 2026
The structural answer lies in material selection. The aluminum alloys used in Cybercab’s front and rear castings do not oxidize and lose strength over time, the way many common automotive aluminum alloys do. Only the side modules, built around hot-stamped boron-steel door rings, receive an anti-corrosion e-coat, or dip coat. Front and rear modules skip coating altogether.
Model Y and Model 3 bodies, by contrast, are fully coated and painted.
Exterior colors come from the plastics shop, which Tesla engineers described as “our paint shop” for the Cybercab. Body panels are produced via reaction injection molding, referred to as RIM. Color is then mixed into a polyurethane resin at the mix head immediately before injection, so the panel emerges already colored with a Class-A surface.
Robots trim overflow to control sink marks and flow lines. The process avoids conventional spray-paint defects like orange peel and paint bleed. Scratches can still be repaired with compatible coatings that behave “basically like paint.” Because color is integral rather than a surface layer, shallow scratches do not expose a contrasting undercoat.
The secret behind Tesla’s Cybercab Gold goes well beyond just the color
Tesla has also explored related approaches, including in-mold lamination and painted films on stamped panels.
The manufacturing payoff is substantial because removing the paint shop, combined with the “unboxed” modular process that builds and tests front, rear, side, and center modules in parallel before a short final assembly, cuts factory floor space per vehicle by about 50 percent.
Final assembly itself uses only about 25 automated stations, far fewer than the typical Model Y line, and the overall line runs at about 78 percent automation, Moravy said. The approach also eliminates volatile organic compound emissions associated with traditional spray painting for these panels and shortens the coloring cycle from hours to minutes.
Cybercab’s paint strategy is clearly less about aesthetics than about systematically deleting capital-intensive, energy-heavy, and space-consuming steps once material science and process design make them unnecessary. It is a concrete example of Tesla applying first-principles questioning to one of the auto industry’s most entrenched factory requirements.
Investor's Corner
Tesla has a Cybercab problem nobody saw coming
Tesla’s Cybercab line now builds robotaxis faster than Tesla can deploy them, Lars Moravy says.
Tesla’s Cybercab line in Texas can now build the two seat robotaxi faster than the company can put it into service, according to Lars Moravy, Tesla’s Vice President of Vehicle Engineering. “We don’t run every day because the line can run so fast. It’s currently outpacing our deployments,” Moravy said in a new Cybercab deep dive from Munro Live. “So, it’s a bit of a race right now. Who’s going to go faster? Right now the manufacturing line’s ahead.”
Tesla’s official Robotaxi account shared a Cybercab analysis video on X on Monday, calling it a “Cybercab engineering deep dive.” Moravy’s comments go further than what he told analysts on the Q3 earnings call last week, when he said the Cybercab line’s listed capacity of more than 125,000 units a year undersells what it can actually run.
The tour shows where that speed comes from. Tesla’s unboxed process splits the Cybercab into front, rear, side and center modules that are built and tested on their own before they meet on a short final line. That final line has just 25 fully automated stations, which Tesla’s team estimated is a fifth to a tenth of what a Model Y needs. The full line is about 78% automated, the framing line is already at 100%, and the layout uses roughly 50% less floor space per vehicle. The stated goal is “100% automation in 10 second cycle time,” or one finished Cybercab every 10 seconds.
Tesla also deleted the paint shop. Only the side modules are coated, and the exterior panels get their color inside the molding machine. Engineers said the car is designed to run at least 500,000 miles, which matters for a vehicle that will spend most of its day carrying riders.
The battery got the same treatment. The Cybercab uses an 88S6P pack of 4680 cells in a steel enclosure, a first for Tesla, with each module potted separately so a single failed module can be swapped instead of the whole pack. Wireless battery management boards replace a wiring harness, and new contactors are fast enough to drop the pyro fuse entirely. Tesla’s battery director graded the pack an A minus, compared with a D for the Model Y structural pack and a B minus for Cybertruck. Up front, the drive unit runs an 11:1 gear ratio versus roughly 9:1 on most Teslas, since the Cybercab does not need a high top speed.
Cybercab engineering deep dive — Robotaxi (@robotaxi) October 26, 2026
The deployment side is now the bottleneck Moravy described. Tesla had more than 50 Cybercabs working the Formula 1 weekend in Austin, and Texas records show 463 Cybercabs registered. Tesla said on its earnings call that Cybercab service will launch in Dallas next month, and Moravy said the company is aiming to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of 2026. Every unit built so far has gone into Tesla’s own fleet since the line moved into volume production in April.
Munro Live also asked when it could get a Cybercab to tear down. Tesla’s answer: “Not yet.”
Starlink is ‘biggest competitive advantage,’ but it’s temporary, United CEO says
Tesla Cybercab’s unorthodox paint process explained
