Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted this weekend that creating a car that is truly self-driving is a “hard problem” to solve.
Musk has been promising to release Full Self-Driving software upgrades for several years, though at present, the electric car company does not offer a completely autonomous driving experience. Instead, Tesla offers an Autopilot feature, which comes standard on its new cars and allows drivers to accelerate, brake, and steer automatically. The company says that the current Autopilot feature still requires “active supervision” from the driver.
Tesla says the Full Self-Driving package is designed to allow for short and long distance trips “with no action required by the person in the driver’s seat.” This includes automatic parking, lane changes, and summoning of the car using the mobile app or key.
“All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go,” the company claims of the Full Self-Driving system.
One Tesla driver tweeted at Musk over the weekend, teasing the car maker over repeated promises of releasing a Full-Self Driving 9 beta within “two weeks.”
Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear!
Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect.
Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 3, 2021
“Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear!” Musk wrote. “Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect.”
In January, footage surfaced showing a Tesla Model 3 making a round trip between San Francisco and Los Angeles using the Full Self-Driving mode. And in March, Musk said that Tesla would soon launch a subscription option for its Full Self-Driving add-on feature.
But even Tesla’s chief of Autopilot is skeptical of Musk’s claims, telling the California Department of Motor Vehicles in May that Musk has been exaggerating the capabilities of Tesla’s autonomous driving capabilities.
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