In an industry first, German carmaker Audi is equipping its latest models with a feature that will allow cars to show when a red light is about to turn green. 
 
 The feature, which allows the cars to receive traffic light information in areas that have centralized control, will roll out city by city. The carmaker expects five to seven cities to be up and running by the end of this year, though Audi won’t say which ones are expected to be first. 
 
 Audi is pitching the technology as a way to make driving more enjoyable. 
 
 “It’s information like this that allows your mind to relax,” Audi general manager Pom Malhotra said in a briefing with reporters in San Francisco. ”That white-knuckle experience goes away.” 
 
 The car will show the time remaining before a light turns green, but only up until a few seconds before it changes, thus hopefully ensuring that the driver looks up to make sure that the light indeed turns as expected. 
 
 Over time, the car could even use the red light information to briefly turn itself off during stops. Or the car could look at the estimated stop time, combined with traffic data, to see if it makes sense to instead turn right and take a different street. 
 
 “These are all enhancements we are looking at with this technology,” Malhotra said. 
 
 More broadly, though, communication between vehicles and traffic infrastructure is seen as critical for the evolution of self-driving cars. 
 
 Audi is also pitching this as a benefit of having technology built directly into the car, rather than coming from Apple or Google via a phone. 
 
 “This is not an app,” Malhotra said. “This is not information that is available on a smartphone that you are using.” 
 
 Audi drivers will have to pay for the service. Traffic light information will be part of Audi’s paid Connect Prime service, which costs between $25 and $33 per month and includes a range of traffic, safety and entertainment services, including music streaming, as well as the cellular data needed to deliver those services. ||||| DETROIT (AP) — Audi is introducing an industry-first system that tells drivers how long it will take for a traffic light to change from red to green. 
 
 The system wirelessly links vehicles to traffic-management computers in certain U.S. cities. Audi is finalizing contracts and says it will announce the cities soon. 
 
 Drivers see the countdown in the instrument cluster. Once four seconds are left before the traffic light turns green, the counter stops so drivers will look up. 
 
 If the system thinks a driver won't make it through a green light, it will also start counting down as if the light were red. 
 
 The system is available on the 2017 Q7 SUV and A4 sedan built after June 1. Drivers must opt for the Connect Prime service, which costs $199 for 6 months. ||||| Tonight, Tesla makes its cars autonomous. Well, semi-autonomous. And it did it with an over-the-air update, effectively making tens of thousands of cars already sold to customers way better. 
 
 There are two things to talk about here. There’s the small story about the features and what the upgrade actually looks like and how it works. That’s a good place to start: This is the biggest change to the visual display of the Model S and X ever. There are new instrument panels, app windows are larger and take up more of the 17-inch touchscreen. Drivers will now get more information about what their cars are doing when in Autopilot, they can lock and unlock their car from the status bar. There’s a new clock! 
 
 These are simple cosmetic changes. The Big Story is that all of this—and really, who cares about anything beyond autopilot mode?—is being pushed through to customers' Teslas overnight. The update will begin being pushed out tonight, and will hit every Tesla made and sold in the US in the past year over the course of this week. 
 
 Before you get too excited about an autonomous, hands-free present, you need to know that you can’t nap in the back, chauffeured around in beautiful, electric silence. 
 
 Even in Autopilot, you keep your hands on the steering wheel. Well… you don’t have to keep your hands on the steering wheel. You can rest them on your knees (resting on knees, palms up, fingertips touching the wheel is advised), or keep one pinky on the wheel. And okay, you can take your hands off altogether for a moment. But after a few seconds, your car will give you a little message, asking you to touch the wheel in some capacity. 
 
 If at any point you grab the wheel, Autopilot will turn off, passing control back to you. The wheel doesn’t have capacitive touch, but it measures torque, so any tiny little movements you make against it, it feels and knows you’re there, and at least sort of responsive. But again, you only have to touch it if you want to—unless you’re in New York, then you’re legally required to have one hand on the wheel. 
 
 "We tell drivers to keep their hands on the wheel just in case, to exercise caution in the beginning," Elon Musk said today at a press event. "Over time, long term, you won't have to keep your hands on the wheel—we explicitly describe this as beta." 
 
 Obviously, there are legal reasons Tesla can’t let you just go totally hands free. There are different regulations all over the country, and stricter ones in Europe, where the company has a large consumer base. TL;DR, this is Tesla’s way of keeping you responsible for your car (and keeping lawyers off its back). 
 
 Still, it’s a fairly aggressive attitude, especially compared to the pokey pace at which other automakers have rolled out similar tech. "Regulators need to see clear evidence that the reliability is there," says Musk. "It works almost to the point where you can take your hands off," Musk laughs, "but we won't say that. Almost." 
 
 It will get more and more refined over time. Eventually, we want it to automatically have your car put itself to bed in your garage. Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk 
 
 So that’s all sort of what it doesn’t do—here’s what it does. Autosteer, the beta feature of Autopilot that's being pushed to the Model S and X, uses real-time feedback features and a suite of sensors—-a front-facing radar, a camera with image recognition capability, and 360-degree ultrasonic sonar—-to read lane lines and detect other vehicles. Based on that info, the car steers itself and maintains a safe speed. 
 
 So will this sensor suite be enough to enable autonomous driving eventually? In a word, no. "This is not the full autonomy sensor suite," says Musk, though he doesn't believe a fully autonomous vehicle requires LIDaR, which is what Google and other automakers use on their autonomous prototypes. "I'm not a big fan of LIDaR, I don't think it makes sense in this context," though he admits his other company, SpaceX, uses it for its spacecraft technology. 
 
 This software update won't work everywhere you go. It’s really for highway and freeway driving—you have to be going at least 18 mph for it to work—where conditions are pretty predictable and driving doesn't get too complicated. More confusing things, like construction, cyclists, garbage cans, errant pets, and traffic lights will still require human piloting to navigate. But long stretches of uneventful road can be relatively hands-off (except for the fact that they are technically hands on). 
 
 To change lanes, you simply select the respective turn signal, and the Model S does the rest—this feature is called Auto Lane Change; it’s off by default. When I tried the feature, I was told you need to still check your blind spots (you know, like a driver should), and then just hit the turn signal to tell your car where to go. But if there is something in the way, the car simply won't budge. If it's all clear, the car speeds up as it moves over, the way most drivers would. 
 
 “The [human] pilot still makes the decision,” says Ricardo Reyes, Tesla’s head of comms. “The car can say ‘something is happening, please pay attention,’ if something happens. We call it ‘Autopilot’ for a reason—you’re still in control here. It’s like a plane: It goes into autopilot, but the pilot still does things like takeoff and landing.” If you start to zone out or fall asleep (which, some of us—points to self—already do while actively driving), the car will beep at you until you take back control. 
 
 And if you don’t take back control, there’s a backup procedure. After flashing a message telling you to take hold of the steering wheel and a series of beeps, if you still aren’t taking over, the car will eventually slow to a stop and put your hazard lights on. Audi and Daimler do the same thing in their prototype systems. 
 
 The Model S and Model X can also now parallel park for you. Self-parking is an increasingly common feature even in non-luxury cars, but it’s nice to know you won’t ding your new Tesla trying to back into that space. 
 
 These are advanced features, to be sure, but Tesla’s not leading the auto industry with the ability to keep a car in its lane and away from other cars—the Mercedes first offered that in Germany with the 2014 S-Class. 
 
 What sets Tesla apart from its pseudo-autonomous driving competitors is The Big Story. The fact that Tesla is pushing all of this via an over the air software update is a huge difference to how other manufacturers, like Honda, Audi, and Mercedes, are going at the same technology. When the update goes out, anyone who’s bought a Tesla made in the past year (Tesla started equipping cars with the necessary sensors in September 2014) will just wake up to an essentially brand new, more capable system. The cars get better as they age. (Sorry early adopters, there’s no way to retrofit the necessary hardware onto older cars to make them drive themselves.) 
 
 Reyes says this forward-thinking attitude means there are also hardware differences that set Tesla apart: Tesla started including the necessary hardware more than a year ago, and that its more central operating system makes such upgrades easier. Other manufacturers have a more piecemeal methodology, building a piece of technology that can do this thing and then putting that physically into the car. “In other cars, all the systems work separately—there are different processors for different parts: the safety system here, the cruise control here,” says Reyes. “And that’s the evolution of building cars in stages, whereas our car has a central operating system, more like what your phone has.” 
 
 "Car-makers need to think of their cars as connected devices, that the way a car should operate, like your cell phone or laptop so you can do improvements over the air," says Musk. "It's important for safety and functionality that car-makers move to a connected philosophy ... It's kind of odd to have a computing device that's not connected." 
 
 That’s the type of thing that will likely play a bigger role going forward than it does right now: Keeping a car in its lane and away from other vehicles is relatively simple, as far as autonomous technology goes, but the bigger idea is that vehicles move to this connected system mentality, you can make all sorts of changes on the fly, as you learn and evolve. Not that other automakers don't know that. "Connected" might be the most important buzzword in the industry right now, though Tesla's undeniably ahead of the curve. 
 
 The fact that Tesla's fleet is connected and receives real-time feedback means the company can continuously make Autopilot smarter. Back in July, Musk complained that the crummy lines on the 405 Interstate around LA made it difficult testing ground for Autopilot (the car's camera had trouble reading them). 
 
 Now, as more and more Model S and X cars hit the roads, they will record and relay the information on highways and freeways across the fleet, creating a car-crowdsourced database of road conditions. 
 
 Still, Musk says, "we really need better lane markings in California." He notes Autopilot works best in places where the road markings are very visible, or in traffic, where things move slowly. He emphasizes the importance of the fleet intelligence in creating an autonomous driving system that can succeed—which, of course, brings up questions about his stated concerns over the rise of AI. "If I'm so afraid of AI, why am I doing this?" he joked. "I don't think we have anything to be afraid of with cars driving themselves, they're not going to take over the world... that's a deeper AI, some sort of AI that due to itself or people, tries to drive civilization in a direction that is not good." Long story short, don't worry about your Model S killing you. 
 
 Rise of the robots aside, Musk and Tesla are future-facing. "This version of Autopilot does not take into account stop signs and red lights, but a future software update will," Musk says. "It will get more and more refined over time. Eventually, we want it to automatically have your car put itself to bed in your garage." He says full autonomy will be here from Tesla in three years, which puts it ahead of the 2020 deadline proposed by Google, Nissan, and Mercedes. (Though regulatory approval will vary.) 
 
 For now, it's (almost) hands-free driving and lane changes. But that's a huge jump for people who spend long hours on the highway, especially in slow-moving traffic. And it's just for now. "I think this is going to be quite a profound experience for people," says Musk. "I think it's going to change people's perceptions of the future, quite rightly."
– If you're the type that likes to gun the engine as soon as the traffic light turns green, you'll love Audi's new models: They include a feature that will alert drivers when a red light is about to change, Recode reports. The Germany company is first offering the feature only in five to seven cities that have centralized traffic light control control; it's expected to roll out by the end of this year. (It will be available in US cities, the AP reports.) The car will count down the time until a light is going to turn green, but will stop counting down a few seconds in advance to ensure drivers actually wait for the light to change before they hit the gas. The feature will be part of Audi's Connect Prime service, which costs $25 to $33 per month and includes other features like music streaming.