Elon Musk says that Tesla’s “unsupervised self-driving begins,” but as usual with the CEO’s statements about self-driving, it’s just “corporate puffery.”
Tesla has released a video showcasing that its vehicles coming out of Fremont factory can now drive themselves to the loading docks for transportation:
I’m not gonna lie. I don’t want to hate on this because I think it is pretty cool. It’s just not what was promised for years.
Literally, Elon Musk said that Tesla would do a driverless cross-country drive by the end of 2018. It never happened. Then he said that by the end of every year since 2020, Tesla would enable unsupervised self-driving in Tesla vehicles. That also never happened.
And now, he retweeted the above video, claiming that “unsupervised self-driving begins.”
The Tesla vehicles in this video drive 1.2 miles on private roads at low speeds around the factory. This is nothing more than what Tesla demonstrated on the private roads of the Warner Bros studio with the Robotaxi last year.
This is clearly not the “beginning of unsupervised self-driving” or at least, not in the way that Musk has promised Tesla FSD owners for years.
Musk’s latest timeline is “unsupervised self-driving in California and Texas around Q2 2025.”
Electrek’s Take
Again, I think this is cool. It is a fun and efficient way to transport vehicles to the loading docks, but that’s about it.
Top comment by Jeff W
There has been an almost singular focus on the technology to date. Virtually nothing about the regulatory and legal aspects of FSD. A few key points:
The technology has been getting better as time goes on. But it is nowhere near ready for even a geofenced launch anywhere as it continues to make an unacceptable errors. When will it reach an "acceptable level of mistakes"? Likely years, if ever.
The legal picture is not fully defined for anyone to launch Level 4 to consumers. Waymo is Level 4, however they are the ones assuming risk in the event of a collision or injuries. There are no specific laws that define who is culpable for consumers if they use a AV program supplied by a manufacturer. All laws on the books simply refer to "the operator". Who, exactly is the operator? For Level 4, it is implied that the vehicle itself is the operator, but the vehicle is owned by the consumer. Will consumers accept Tesla not assuming any liability if their FSD fails? It will take years for the legislative definitions to be created, and years for the courts to assign culpability when accidents occur.
There is no standardization of infrastructure in the US, no rules on how to safely conduct road construction, no rules on directing traffic around accidents. Level 4 systems will have difficulty in adapting to these and other scenarios, to the point that Level 4 itself may not be able to be done across the country. It may result is Level 3 being the best FSD will ever be.
Anyone who has used FSD should know that this is not more impressive than FSD, and FSD is still years away from being ready to be unsupervised.
I strongly believe that if FSD was developed in a vacuum without Elon’s comments and Tesla selling it as a package with future upgrades, people would celebrate FSD has a great program. Instead, it’s becoming a joke.
You have Elon claiming that this is the “beginning of unsupervised self-driving” and Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s head of FSD, added: “just a matter of time before it’s rolling on public roads.”
Yes, a matter of time. A long time while you sell this package to people promising it will happen by the end of the year.
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