According to Elon Musk, there’s one thing that’s holding back Tesla’s Full Self Driving.
It’s like dejavu; the Tesla CEO’s been teasing us for years now.
But the automaker’s closer than ever to cracking it apparently.
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If you cast your mind back to 2016, Musk said then that Tesla’s driver-assist feature – Autopilot – would be able to drive better than a human in two to three years.
He also commented that by 2018, it would be possible to remotely summon a Tesla.
Then, in 2019, he said Tesla could have a fleet of a million robotaxis by the end of 2020, if the company pumped out hundreds of thousands of full self-driving cars.
Obviously, none of these things have come to fruition – but atleast the Tesla chief’s consistent with his fruitless predictions.
He even acknowledges his predictions have been wide of the mark.
“I know I’m the boy who cried FSD,” Musk said on Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call.
“But man, I think we’ll be better than human by the end of the year.”
Sounds like there’s another prediction coming…
Actually, Musk said the EV company’s closer than ever to cracking it.
Apparently, they only have one piece of the puzzle left to solve: “vehicle control”.
And the biggest hurdle, he said, is not in creating the technology, but training the AI.
“It is training as I write this. Our progress is currently training compute-constrained, not engineer-constrained,” Musk said.
“Vehicle control is the final piece of the Tesla FSD AI puzzle. That will drop >300k lines of C++ control code by ~2 orders of magnitude.”
That last bit went over our heads, so we’ll have to take Musk’s word for it.
But what we do know is that back in April, he said he thinks Tesla will solve full self driving by the end of the year.
Whether that will happen, who knows; there are several government investigations ongoing into the safety of the technology.
