Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal, who is also a board member at Tesla, is not as optimistic as his brother about Tesla delivering ‘Full Self-Driving’. He says: “maybe 5 years”.
Virtually every year for the past five years, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said that the company will achieve full self-driving capability by the end of the year.
It has become a sort of running joke.
Again, a month into the year, Musk recently said that Tesla’s self-driving would become a clear reality “probably this year.”
Over the years, there have been many reports about other people at Tesla feeling that Musk was too optimistic about his self-driving timelines.
Now, it looks like even his own brother is a bit more careful about stating when Tesla is going to be able to remove the steering wheel inside its vehicles.
When asked about it in an interview with Graham Bensinger, Kimbal said:
I would say maybe 5 years. Definitely, in this decade. I think we might come out with the robotaxi before that, and it would have no steering wheel at all. You also have to do government regulations. We need to get through that.
Here’s the video interview:
Electrek’s Take
Top comment by Martin W Jørgensen
Technology always develops rapidly in the beginning and then the improvements tapers off - It takes 10% of the time to get 90% done. It's the last 10% that takes 90% of the time. Think about how microprocessors developed rapidly in the beginning and now the improvements are very slow and very incremental. We see the same with AI/ML at the moment where they first did rapid development and then it slows down rate of improvement as it gets more and more "mature". Factoring that in, true FSD that will be able to drive in any situation anywhere will never happen, only some version of an automated driver system that can handle known areas
I think a five-year timeline is much more realistic, which is interesting coming from Kimbal, a board member. There’s no doubt that Elon would know a lot more about the program as CEO, but he seems to always think Tesla is on the verge of achieving self-driving.
As usual, I like to remind people that self-driving is an extremely difficult problem to solve and normally, I wouldn’t be too hard on Tesla for not delivering it yet. However, I feel like it’s OK to be tougher on Tesla since it decided to sell the feature to everyone before delivering it.
I previously reported that I see Tesla FSD Beta v12 as sort of the automaker’s last hope to deliver the capacity. It includes a full architecture rewrite of the system and finally introduces neural net-based vehicle controls. All of the pieces of the puzzle are in there now. The only thing left is to train and improve the system, but we heard that one before.
It feels like if Tesla can’t make it work with that, there’s serious doubt about achieving self-driving on the current hardware.
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