Tesla CEO Elon Musk: ‘self-driving will encompass all modes of driving by the end of 2019’

Tesla CEO Elon Musk: ‘self-driving will encompass all modes of driving by the end of 2019’

lon Musk has often updated his timeline for fully self-driving vehicles and today, he updated again when talking about the advent of artificial intelligence.

Tesla’s CEO now says that he expects the technology will start to be widespread in any aspect of driving as soon as within “the next 18 months.”

Musk’s timeline for the advent of self-driving technology is especially interesting to many Tesla owners who bought the automaker’s recent vehicles equipped with Autopilot 2.0 (and 2.5) hardware, which supposedly should eventually enable fully self-driving capability with future software updates.

He has recently been advancing a “two-year” timeline and now during a Q&A session at SXSW today, Musk added that he thinks “self-driving will encompass all modes of driving by the end of the next year.”

While he wasn’t directly talking about Tesla, he previously stated that the automaker aimed to be the first to market with a fully self-driving technology safer than human drivers.

During the Q&A, Musk also added that he thinks Autopilot 2.0 will be “2 to 3 times” safer than human drivers.

Musk has often put forward this timeline of self-driving being just “two years” away since back in 2015 when Tesla was just starting to work on Autopilot.

Last year, Musk said that Tesla was aiming for level 5 autonomy, the highest level, which allows the “driver” to sleep in the car. His timeline for this was, at that time, two years out.

Tesla already sells vehicles with the ‘Fully Self-Driving’ feature, which is currently disabled. However, the company claims they will eventually enable it through software updates as soon as they can demonstrate it to be safer than humans and that regulations allow it.

Read more : https://electrek.co/2018/03/11/tesla-ceo-elon-musk-self-driving-next-year/