Tesla director contradicts Elon Musk’s timeline for autonomous cars

Based on a recent statement by Elon Musk, it’s anticipated that Tesla is making progress towards becoming driverless by the end of the year. That excitement was cut short when Tesla’s Director of Autopilot software reportedly contradicted that statement.

When an analyst asked the Chief Executive of Tesla about his belief that Tesla would achieve ‘Level 5 autonomy’, a car that can drive itself in all situations, by the end of the year, he said;

"I'm confident based on my understanding of the technical roadmap and the progress that we're making between each beta iteration."

According to a memo obtained by transparency site Plainsite via a freedom of information request, six weeks after Elon Musk made that statement, Tesla's director of Autopilot software, CJ Moore, contradicted Musk in a meeting with California regulators.

It says: “DMV asked CJ to address, from an engineering perspective, Elon’s messaging about L5 capability by the end of the year.”

The memo further reads: “Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality per CJ.”

The DMV memo further summarizes the Tesla representatives' comments as: “Tesla is at Level 2 currently. The ratio of driver interaction would need to be in the magnitude of 1 or 2 million miles per driver interaction to move into higher levels of automation. Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of improvement when speaking about L5 capabilities. Tesla couldn’t say if the rate of improvement would make it to L5 by end of the calendar year.”

So what is the timeline for Tesla L5 capability? Elon Musk is pretty assertive they’ll achieve that by the end of 2021. Even in a December 2020 interview, the Tesla CEO said he was ‘extremely confident’ that Tesla vehicles would reach level 5 within a year.

It’s not even as though the bar for L5 has been cut down to fit an easy mold, like ‘5G Internet’ in the United States. Although how Tesla defines a driver interaction’, is not too clear, it has a very high standard for the capability.

Previously, letters to the California DMV in November and December argued that the FSD beta ‘will continue to be an SAE Level 2, advanced driver-assistance feature,’ not a fully autonomous system. Tesla indicated that work on ‘true autonomous features’ would start at a later date.

Perhaps the company is making progress which led to Elon Musk making a hopeful statement, but his timeline is just off. This wouldn’t be the first time he did that.

Two years ago, Elon Musk confidently predicted that Tesla's software would be sophisticated enough to allow Tesla vehicles to operate as fully autonomous robotaxis by the end of 2020. Prior to that, in June 2016 when Elon Musk was asked for a timeline to achieve fully autonomous vehicles. He said; “I really would consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem, I think we're basically less than two years away from complete autonomy.”

Four months later, Tesla unveiled a new version of its Autopilot hardware. At the time Elon Musk predicted that a Tesla would be able to drive from coast to coast ‘without the need for a single touch’ by the end of 2017. Another Pakistani Actress Shares Experiencing Child Sexual Abuse