Elon predicts Tesla achieving full self-driving this year

In Tesla’s Q4 2021 Earnings call on Jan 26th, the CEO commented “that he would be “shocked” if Tesla does not achieve “Full Self-Driving safer than human this year.” Which is par for the course for Elon.

Musk has been “shocked” about the slow progress of the company’s “self-driving” software for years now, consistently overblowing the advancements made by Tesla’s FSD (Full Self-Driving) team. The CEO has been making claims that FSD will be solved “next year” or “soon” since 2018, and has adjusted his language each time to better fit the realities of such a complex system.

This time however the boast is that FSD will not only be “Safer than Human” (no metrics mentioned of course), but that he thinks it will happen this year. That’s a hell of a boast considering his engineers consistently say otherwise when making official communications with the DMV.

This isn’t to say that the FSD system isn’t impressive. Despite the safety issues, the current 10.9 update is robust and, under driver supervision, appears to be fairly good at navigating traffic. Reportedly, over 60,000 users are beta testing this tech, and the results seem promising even though it’s still confused by traffic cones.

So why does Musk keep making these big predictions? Well, he is a CEO, and the biggest promoter of the Tesla brand. It’s certainly not a crime to have faith in your own tech, but lots of folks hang on Elon’s word, and are justifiably confused when the realities of such a difficult engineering problem force a change in predictions. Elon talks big about millions of robotaxis and “safer than human” systems, but without hard data to support that it mostly seems like the CEO doesn’t really know what’s going on.

For what it's worth, Tesla’s engineers are very talented, and they know more than anyone where this technology is currently. FSD Beta may not be doing much for safety now, but given some time, it’s hard to imagine the system not at least helping to make our roads safer. Keep an eye on the data folks, and be patient.