Tesla CEO Eyes Fully Autonomous Car by End of 2019
Tesla is “making really good progress” toward achieving full autonomy in self-driving vehicles that would become part of a ride-sharing network, said CEO Elon Musk on a Wednesday earnings call. “We'll probably be ready by the end of next year.”…
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Regulatory oversight is the big unknown in light of recent fatalities, said Musk, including the death of a Tesla Model X driver in a March 23 accident in Mountain View, California. Musk ripped into the news media for what he called “inflammatory” stories falsely depicting autonomous-driving as unsafe. “Autonomy doesn't reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero,” he said. "It improves it substantially.” If the media are “hounding the regulators, and the public is laboring on misapprehension that autonomy is less safe because of misleading press, then this is where I find the challenge of predicting it to be very difficult,” said Musk of timelines for regulatory OK. The company is seeing a “steady increase” in the “percentage of miles driven using Autopilot,” except for temporary “dips” that occurred after accidents like the one in Mountain View, said Musk.