Elon Musk explains the final hurdle
Musk said himself that he is the “boy who cried FSD” — but the Tesla CEO thinks the company is really close.
Elon Musk has been talking about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving technology for years. In 2016, the CEO said that Tesla’s driver-assist feature — Autopilot — will be able to drive better than a human in two to three years. He also said that by 2018, it would be possible to remotely summon a Tesla (TSLA) – Get Free Report across the country.
In 2019, he said that Tesla could have a fleet of a million robotaxis by the end of 2020 if the company pumped out hundreds of thousands of FSD cars.
The Tesla chief’s fruitless predictions about FSD have become so consistent that he has begun to acknowledge them himself.
“I know I’m the boy who cried FSD,” he said on Tesla’s second-quarter earnings call. “But man, I think we’ll be better than human by the end of this year.”
Tesla’s FSD — which Musk hinted might soon come out of Beta — is not yet true full self-driving. While active, the car will drive itself, but it requires full driver supervision. The FSD that Musk keeps predicting is just around the corner would be true FSD; the result would be a self-driving car that does not require any driver attention at all.
Musk said Aug. 1 that the EV company is closer than ever to cracking it. They have only one piece of the puzzle left to solve: “vehicle control.” And the biggest hurdle, he said, is not in creating the technology but in 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.”
Musk said in April that he thinks Tesla will solve FSD by the end of the year.
In the midst of Musk’s excitement over FSD, there are several government investigations ongoing into the safety of that technology. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been conducting a probe into the company for several years now; the California attorney general recently began investigating the same feature.
Tesla’s stock was down more than 2% pre-market Tuesday.