Elon Musk Concedes Making Autonomous Cars Is Harder Than Expected

Elon Musk has made several predictions over the years regarding when Tesla would introduce a dependable full self-driving (FSD) system and so far they have proven to be a bit too optimistic. He said it was going to happen in 2018, then 2019, then 2020 and we’re now in 2021 and FSD is still not quite ready - it’s in a Beta stage  right now and still months away from being called final.

The company also recently gave up on radar sensors in favor of a fully camera-based system (Tesla Vision) and, in spite of some criticism, it has made it work. It even regained the top safety ratings from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) and Consumer Reports, which were lost after the switch to cameras-only, so Tesla is definitely not wasting time developing its safety and self-driving tech.

And yet, it seems that after Tesla started rolling out its FSD Beta program in October of last year, the rate of development seems to have slowed down somewhat. The current version, V8.2 was released back in March, and it has certainly brought improvements, but now we’re awaiting yet another major beta release, Version 9, expected to be rolled out sometime in the second half of 2021, should bring even more advanced features and dependability to the system.

The biggest news with V9 is that it will fully embrace Tesla Vision, but it was supposed to have already been released by now. In an older tweet, Musk said it would come out in June, which has now passed, then on July 2, he said V9 was just two weeks away. 

In the meantime, Tesla owners and fans are growing impatient and are starting to troll the Tesla CEO, like in this tweet that he replied to, uncovered by Electrek. Here, a Model 3 owner @BLKMDL3 jokingly changed the name of his car to “Two Weeks” to poke fun at Musk for providing yet another deadline that may or may not be met.

In his reply, Musk admits that the self-driving nut is a hard one to crack, harder than he initially anticipated, yet he swears that the company will stick to the new two-week deadline.

 

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Watch Tesla FSD in action

Watch Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta Work Wonders In A Slew Of Edge Cases

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