Tesla’s fully self-driving cross-country road trip to ‘probably’ happen with version 10 ‘alpha build’, says Elon Musk

Tesla has been talking about demonstrating the full capabilities of its second generation Autopilot system with a fully self-driving cross-country road trip for 2 years now, but it has yet to happen.

Now CEO Elon Musk gives a new timeline for the fully self-driving cross-country road trip: ‘probably’ with the release of version 10 ‘alpha’.

As Musk previously stated, Tesla could technically do a self-driving cross-country trip right now with the current hardware in their vehicles.

That said, they would create an ideal route for the system in order for Autopilot to avoid any corner cases that it wouldn’t be able to handle.

The CEO called that “cheating” and instead, he wants to demonstrate a capability that he has been talking about since the release of Autopilot 2.0: being able to summon your Tesla from anywhere in the continental US and have the car drive itself to you.

In order to demonstrate that, he has been talking about summoning the car from Los Angeles and traveling to New York.

A demonstration of the capability was first planned for the end of 2017 – a year after Tesla released Autopilot 2.0, but it never happened.

Now Musk says that they plan to “probably” make it happen with the Tesla Version 10 alpha build:

Probably V10 alpha build

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 17, 2018

While it’s an interesting comment, we don’t have an actual timeline on the availability of the V10 alpha build.

Tesla has yet to release version 9, but it roll out in the next few weeks if all goes well.

Before moving to version 10, Tesla is expected to release incremental updates to version 9. For how long? No one knows.

There were about 2 years between the release of version 8 and version 9.

That said, version 10 is expected sooner rather than later since Musk has already been talking about features to be released in the upcoming update, including a ‘car karaoke’ mode and a video streaming feature for the center screen.

Electrek’s Take

I know that it’s hard to be thinking about version 10 right now when we are all waiting to get version 9, but I think they will work together well.

The way I see it, version 9 will bring the Enhanced Autopilot features that we have all been waiting for and Tesla will build on those features using its neural net and machine learning to make the system increasingly safer and lead to full self-driving.

I think the next few months are going to be exciting for Autopilot 2.0 owners. Remember to be safe and always attentive on the road.