Elon Musk has made the audacious claim that Tesla will release a fully-autonomous driving system to customers in 2021.
The electric car manufacturer recently released its Full Self-Driving Beta system to select owners, but despite what the name of the system might have you believe, it does not have Level 5 capabilities nor is it anywhere near perfect. That hasn’t stopped Musk from making one of his characteristically overly-ambitious claims about how close Tesla is to achieve full autonomy.
After recently receiving the Axel Springer Award in Germany, Musk was asked when Tesla will deliver full autonomy.
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“To actually answer your question, I am extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year,” he said. Musk added that the regulatory landscape will prove to be more complicated, although he did express his belief that “at least some jurisdictions are going to allow full self-driving next year.”
Will Tesla indeed be releasing full autonomy to customers in 2021 and have the regulatory approval to do so? That’s a hard one to answer. After all, Musk has been wrong in the past about the introduction of autonomous technologies – and to be fair, the same stands true for other automotive executives…
In the middle of this year, he claimed that the automaker’s cars would be fully autonomous by the end of 2020. In 2019, he claimed there would be 1 million Tesla robotaxis on the roads by the end of the year. Currently, there are zero. Then there’s Musk infamous claim that Tesla would demonstrate one of its vehicles driving autonomously across the U.S. The initial goal was for this demonstration to take place in 2017, but it has yet to materialize.