Tesla Autonomous Cars Under Development Will ‘Blow People's Minds,’ Says CEO
Tesla “cannot sneeze without there being a national headline” about autonomous vehicles, said CEO Elon Musk in an earnings Q&A. He was asked whether the company, in order to build public support for self-driving cars, plans to be more “transparent” in its reporting of autonomous-vehicle incidents, such as the highly publicized fatal accident in Florida involving a Tesla Model S in autopilot mode (see 1607010052).
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Musk thinks “you don't have to worry too much about whether we'll report it because the media will, and then inflate it in size by 1,000,” he said Wednesday. Tesla as a standard practice shares its autonomous-vehicle incident data with regulators “as soon as we know it,” as it did in the Florida fatality, “certainly weeks before” the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration opened a formal probe into the crash, he said. “In fact, we're not totally clear on why they opened the investigation, because they actually had all the information before they made a formal investigation.” Tesla thinks “there wasn't really anything more to learn” from opening a formal probe, he said. NHTSA representatives didn’t comment Thursday.
Earnings calls are not the appropriate venue for making “major product announcements,” Musk said when asked to give specific calendar-year targets, as other automakers have, for when Tesla expects to put fully autonomous cars on the road. “All I'd say is that full autonomy is going to come a hell of a lot faster than anyone thinks it will,” said Musk. “And I think what we've got under development is going to blow people's minds.”
It’s just “really a software limitation” that’s standing in the way of developing cars with “full autonomy,” Musk said. “So it's really about developing advanced, narrow AI for the car to operate on,” he said of artificial intelligence. “I want to emphasize narrow AI,” meaning “it's, like, not going to take over the world, but it needs to be really good at driving a car,” he said. “So increasingly sophisticated neural maps that can operate in reasonably sized computers in the car -- that's our focus. I'm very optimistic about this. It's exciting, it blows me away, the progress we're making. So I think if I'm this close to it and it's blowing me away, it's really going to blow other people away when they see it for the first time.”
Musk thinks demand for autonomous cars ultimately “will vastly outweigh the production capability,” he said. Tesla estimates the “global fleet” of vehicles on the road today numbers about 2.5 billion, while “total new vehicle production per year is only about 100 million,” Musk said. That means the fleet “is basically turning over every roughly 20, 25 years,” he said. “So we would have to make some truly enormous number of autonomous vehicles for there to be any land saturation because it will basically be the only car anyone wants to buy.”