Elon Musk: Fully Autonomous Tesla Car Will Be Ready in 2 Years

Tesla only just released its Autopilot feature, but two years from now, the company will be ready to make an even bigger announcement. According to CEO Elon Musk, that’s when we should expect Tesla to have produced its first fully autonomous car.

“We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years,” Musk told Fortune. While the technology will be ready by then, it could take an additional year or more for regulators to assure it is safe for public roads, he said.

“I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments—and then we’re done,” Musk explained.

He didn’t provide specifics on an upcoming autonomous Tesla car, but it’s clear that his timeline has changed. Fifteen months ago, Musk said it could take 5 or 6 years to prepare a fully autonomous car.

While many automakers plan to gradually introduce driverless car technologies, Google joins Tesla in making particularly ambitious goals. The tech giant says it plans to make autonomous car technology available by 2020, although a new proposed law in California would require driverless cars to have steering wheels and brakes so that actual drivers can intervene if necessary. While Google expressed disappointment with the rule, Musk agrees with the decision.

“The data is not yet there to support a fully autonomous vehicle,” Musk said. “The point at which it becomes statistically clear that an autonomous car is safer, I think, regulators will be comfortable with allowing it.”

Musk remains quite outspoken when it comes to autonomous cars. Previously, he predicted human drivers would be outlawed in the future as driverless cars would provide a safer means of transportation. He has also said that driverless technology could be approved by regulators sooner if the systems only operated passively at first. That way, they could internally record how the autonomous system would have responded in dangerous road situations compared to how the driver actually drove, giving regulators the data they need to approve the technology.

Source: Fortune

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