"People like me, we roll our eyes when we hear claims like this from Tesla," said Ragunathan Rajkumar, a co-director of Carnegie Mellon's Connected and Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab, about Musk's recent prediction.
Fully-autonomous driving technology is likely a minimum of eight years away, and it is highly unlikely that Tesla or any other company will have self-driving consumer vehicles ready by the end of this year, Rajkumar said.Among the biggest obstacles Tesla faces has nothing to do with complicated software: Its cars have no mechanism to clean the cameras, radar, and ultrasonic sensors that comprise the company's autonomous-hardware suite, Abuelsamid said.
"They don't have anything on their cars to keep the sensors clean," he said, which means that, even if Tesla developed fully-autonomous driving software, the company's vehicles would only be able to drive themselves in favorable weather and environmental conditions. Otherwise, the sensors could become covered with dirt, snow, or debris and have trouble detecting objects around them.
And Tesla's system, which leans heavily on cameras and does not include the lidar sensors — which emit pulses of light to detect nearby objects — that many of the company's competitors use, could also have problems when visibility is limited.
"If there's anyone that's close to it, it's probably Waymo and maybe GM/Cruise, but even they are not there yet, and they will tell you that," Abuelsamid said."That's why they still have human safety drivers."Have you worked for Tesla? Do you have a story to share? Contact this reporter at
techinsider How is a company CEO allowed to make such marketing claims without investigation of false or misleading practices?
Because there will be so few of them and no longer made, I guess...
'experts' + journalists versus billionaire Elon Musk who keeps proving 'experts' + journalists wrong.
SAI jajaja
elonmusk experts... They got payed by oil companies.
if your car can evolve then i mean yeah