Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk had already announced his intentions to take his company in the direction of self-driving vehicles, but last time we heard of this, he shared few details, aside from the fact that their system would not be fully-autonomous one like the ones announced by other manufacturers.
Now, we can shed more light on the matter, as the South African-born entrepreneur revealed more about his plan for the Financial Times newspaper, and which was reported by Reuters.
First off, he reinforced the idea that Tesla is more into getting a semi-assisted system to work, rather than taking too long to get a completely autonomous one up and running to industry standards. Their solution would allow the driver to remain inactive, let the car do up to 90 percent of the work and it’s said to be coming in three years’ time too, so that’s better than some of the other deadlines and terms we’ve recently heard being thrown around.
Besides, our current level of technology easily allows for the development of autonomous driving technology, hence the short announced development time and the reportedly good results that have been reported with prototypes from Google, Mercedes-Benz seem to be doing it quite well too. However, don’t be fooled as their S-Class video is not spontaneous, and the car could not have completed its journey without it having been pre-planned and injected with detail that is usually lacking from regular sat-nav maps.
The real hurdle will probably be the legal one, and gaining people’s trust – convincing them that it’s safe to let a hackable machine make decisions that their life depends on. Tesla has gone over legal hurdles before triumphantly, and the company’s achievements are so far very impressive, so chances are, their ‘auto-pilot’ will be too.
By Andrei Nedelea
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