Tesla just delivered bad news for self-driving cars — contradicting Elon Musk

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Tesla only delivered bad news for self-driving cars — contradicting Elon Musk

(Image credit: Tesla)

Dorsum in January, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company was "highly confident" that its cars would achieve full Level 5 self-driving autonomy in 2021. It turns out that merely 41 days later, one of the company'due south engineers was offer a less optimistic timeline to California'due south regulators.

The revelation comes from a letter exchange, released by the legal transparency group Plainsite, betwixt California's Section of Motor Vehicles and CJ Moore, a Tesla Autopilot engineer.

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"Tesla is at Level 2 currently," the annotation reads. "The ratio of driver interaction would demand to be in the magnitude of 1 or 2 million miles per commuter interaction to move into college levels of automation.

"Tesla indicated that Elon is extrapolating on the rates of comeback when speaking about [Level v] capabilities. Tesla couldn't say if the rate of improvement would brand it to L5 by finish of calendar twelvemonth."

More directly, every bit spotted by Ars Technica, a redacted sentence that appears directly before this can still exist copied and pasted and simply reads: "Elon's tweet does not friction match technology reality per CJ." It'due south not clear what tweet this refers to, as there don't seem to exist any Level five related content on Musk's Twitter feed ahead of the March ix publication appointment, though it'due south possible something has been deleted.

Tesla Autopilot: What is Level 5?

In self-driving machine terms, Level 5 is a car that is completely autonomous, while Level 0 is a vehicle with no automation at all. As the note suggests, Tesla vehicles' Autopilot functionality is currently at Level 2, meaning it'southward more in the realm of assistance rather than existence trustworthy enough to bulldoze unsupervised.

It's quite a step up from Level 2 to Level five, and this isn't the first fourth dimension that Musk has been overly optimistic with the development fourth dimension scales involved. Dorsum in 2016 he said he considered "autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem" adding that "I think we're basically less than two years abroad from consummate autonomy" (though he did add together that regulators would take "at least some other year" to approve the tech.)

By 2019, Musk had revised the guess to the cease of 2020, a prediction he again made concluding year stating that "at that place are no fundamental challenges remaining", just "many small problems."

If the notes between regulators and Tesla are to exist believed, these pocket-size problems may exist a flake bigger than the CEO predictable.

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Freelance correspondent Alan has been writing about tech for over a decade, covering phones, drones and everything in betwixt. Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are found all over the web and in the occasional magazine too. When not weighing up the pros and cons of the latest smartwatch, you'll probably notice him tackling his ever-growing games backlog. Or, more likely, playing Spelunky for the millionth fourth dimension.

Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/tesla-just-delivered-bad-news-for-self-driving-cars-contradicting-elon-musk

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