Elon Musk would be ‘surprised’ if Tesla doesn’t have ‘unsupervised self-driving’ next year

Elon Musk says that he would be ‘surprised’ if Tesla doesn’t have “unsupervised” self-driving next year.

Though, like most of Musk’s self-driving timeline, you should probably ignore.

Musk has famously predicted that Tesla would achieve self-driving “by the end of the year” every year since 2019.

Lately, the CEO has been more careful regarding those predictions, but he strayed from that caution on the conference call following the release of Tesla’s Q2 2024 financial results.

Currently, Tesla vehicles with the “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) package in North America are using what Tesla calls “supervised Full Self-Driving”. It automatically performs all the tasks related to driving, but it is far from perfect, and therefore, it requires drivers to pay attention at all times and be ready to take control.

Tesla’s promise is to eventually make it “unsupervised” self-driving through a software update once it is safe to do so and regulators approve.

Today, Musk said that he believes this is possible this year and if not, he would be “surprised” if it doesn’t happen next year.

The CEO is again claiming that it will show regulators that Tesla’s FSD is safer than human drivers and expect them to approve the system for unsupervised driving. This would allow Tesla to turn the feature on in existing vehicles in its fleet.

That’s for North America, at least. Europe and Asia still don’t have “unsupervised” FSD.

On that subject, Musk added that he believes those markets will get supervised FSD by the end of the year.

Electrek’s Take

As usual, I wouldn’t put too much weight on that prediction from Elon.

It is better to follow Tesla’s official comments, which are way more cautious. For example, Tesla said today that the deployment is dependent on both “technological advancement and regulatory approval”:

That generally means “we don’t know for sure when it is going to be ready”. After almost 3 years of FSD Beta, I’ll go with that.