Elon Musk says he’d be surprised if Tesla doesn’t have an “unsupervised” self-driving car next year.
However, as with most of Musk’s self-driving timeline, you’ll probably have to ignore it.
Musk has predicted that Tesla would achieve self-driving “by the end of the year” every year since 2019.
Recently, the CEO has been more cautious about these expectations, but he deviated from that caution in the conference call following the release of Tesla’s financial results for the second quarter of 2024.
Currently, Tesla cars equipped with the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package in North America use what Tesla calls “supervised full self-driving.” It performs all driving-related tasks automatically, but it’s far from perfect, and therefore requires drivers to be attentive at all times and ready to take control.
Tesla has promised to eventually make the self-driving car “unsupervised” through a software update once it is safe to do so and regulatory approval is granted.
Musk said today that he believes it is possible this year, and if it doesn’t happen he would be “surprised” if it doesn’t happen next year.
The company’s CEO again claims that this will show regulators that Tesla’s FSD system is safer than human drivers and expects them to approve the system for unsupervised driving. This would allow Tesla to turn on the feature in vehicles in its fleet.
This is true for North America at least. Europe and Asia still do not have an “unsupervised” food security system.
In this regard, Musk added that he believes that these markets will be subject to FSD supervision by the end of the year.
Electrek’s opinion
As usual, I won’t put too much weight on this prediction from Elon.
It’s best to follow Tesla’s official comments, which are more cautious. For example, Tesla said today that deployment of the technology is dependent on “technological progress and regulatory approval”:
This generally means “we don’t know for sure when it will be ready”. After nearly 3 years of FSD Beta release, I would agree.
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