Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that unsupervised full self-driving is probably coming by the end of the year. Next year, almost definitely. You know, like he’s said a dozen times in the past.
During Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call on Tuesday, Musk once again claimed that Tesla is nearing the age of unsupervised full self-driving in its cars. This time, however, he believes that it’s bound to happen in the next five months—possibly.
Musk’s Long History Of Inaccurate FSD Timelines
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has claimed that an unsupervised version of its Full Self-Driving product will be headed to consumers yet again. This isn’t the first time that Musk has claimed Tesla would solve self-driving. In fact, such claims can be found almost annually stemming back to 2016 and beyond. But now, Musk says that he would be “shocked” if Tesla can’t launch unsupervised FSD by 2025.
“Based on the current trend, it seems as though we should get the miles between interventions to be high enough that it should be far in excess of humans that you could do unsupervised possibly by the end of the year,” said Musk. He continued:
“I would be shocked if we cannot do it next year. Next year seems highly probable to me.”
Musk has made rather ambitious claims like this before. He even kicked off the timeline explanation with a joke about how he has been overly optimistic with his timelines on certain Tesla-related projects—FSD included.
In fact, Musk has been claiming that Tesla was headed to “complete autonomy” since 2015—almost a decade ago. In 2016, Musk claimed that Tesla would demonstrate a full end-to-end autonomous drive across the country in 2017, and that drivers would be able to summon a car from New York to Los Angeles by 2018. Whether or not Tesla will actually hit this new claim of unsupervised FSD by the end of 2024 (or 2025 for that matter) remains to be seen.
As for other countries, FSD is also headed to regulators’ desks for on-road approval. Musk says that he expects the feature to be approved in both Europe and China by the end of this year.
Tesla engineers are now also under immense pressure to quickly solve self-driving due to the automaker’s impending launch of its robotaxi product, and now its goal of getting unsupervised FSD to the streets by the end of this year, probably.
The automaker has already pushed the reveal of the robotaxi back from August 8th and announced that it would be instead held on October 10th, buying a few months for additional prototyping. But the model itself won’t offer public rides until unsupervised FSD is ready. When will that be? The answer—as it’s been for years—is this year maybe, next year definitely.
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