"Satellite"? Maybe not this time. For fully automatic driving, musk announced an ambitious timetable: to have a truly autonomous vehicle next year. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an interview in Brazil on Friday that he expected Tesla to launch a completely manual free car within about a year.
Musk is currently visiting South America. It met with Brazilian president jair bolsonaro on Friday to discuss how to use SpaceX technology to help schools in rural areas provide the Internet and help monitor deforestation in the Amazon rainforest.
This is not the first time musk made a bold statement. As early as December 2015, he predicted that he would achieve "full autonomy" within two years, but the time plan has been readjusted many times since then.
But the timetable given by musk this time is not completely impossible. Tesla is trying to achieve this goal through its FSD beta program.
At the previous earnings conference call, musk claimed that Tesla FSD would make significant progress this year. It said that in order to solve the current problems of FSD, Tesla must fundamentally solve the artificial intelligence obstacles in the real world, and must ensure that Tesla's neural network and camera functions are at least consistent with, or even better than, the human level.
According to the information disclosed at the conference call, FSD is iterating rapidly with a frequency of about two weeks. At present, more than 100000 people have participated in Tesla FSD beta program, and the number of participants is expected to increase significantly this year.
In a recent interview at the AllInOne summit, musk said the FSD beta program was "very complex" and said the company should be able to expand the program to about 1 million Tesla owners by the end of this year.
There is no clear time for Tesla's first production of roboti in 2024.