Tesla CEO Elon Musk says a lot of things, but his statements should be taken with a grain of salt.
If that wasn’t already made clear by comments about ‘pedo guy’ and taking Tesla private, his own company has admitted what he says sometimes has no basis in reality.
The stunning rebuttal was uncovered as part of a public records request for information about discussions Tesla had with the California Department of Motor Vehicles in March. While most of the talks revolved around Tesla’s Full Self-Driving beta, the DMV asked about Musk claiming Level 5 autonomous driving capability would arrive before the end of the year.
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Since Tesla currently offers a Level 2 semi-autonomous driving system, jumping to a fully-autonomous Level 5 system would be a major change. However, that seems unlikely as Tesla’s CJ Moore told the DMV that “Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality.”
The memo also states “Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities,” but “Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of calendar year.”
Despite billing the technology as full-self driving, “Tesla indicated that they are still firmly in L2” territory. This was backed up by a letter to Tesla’s Eric Williams which stated, “Notwithstanding other public messaging from Tesla about developing vehicles capable of full driving automation, Tesla reiterated that the City Streets feature is currently a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) level two (2) Advanced Driver-Assistance feature and that Tesla will continue to monitor how participants interact with the feature and make improvements.”
The letter went on to remind Tesla that California regulations require the automaker to “seek the appropriate regulatory permitting from the DMV before autonomous vehicles are operated on public roads” with Level 3 or higher technology.
H/T to The Verge
