Honest Thinking: Why Did Elon Musk Say in 2017 a Self-Driving Tesla Would Go from LA to NYC in 2017?

Sign up for daily news updates from CleanTechnica on email. Or follow us on Google News!

---

One of the more wild claims Elon Musk has made — regarding Tesla, that is — was back in 2016 when he said a self-driving Tesla would be able to go from Los Angeles to New York City “in ~2 years” (in early 2018).

A year and a few months later, Musk said they were “still on” for the end of 2017. In other words, everything was on track and several months later, Tesla vehicles would be able to go from the US West Coast to the US East Coast autonomously.

After missing those targets, Musk said on a Tesla investor call on February 7, 2018, that they would “probably” be able to “do a coast-to-coast drive in three months, six months at the outside.” So, the groundbreaking self-driving demo would be coming by about May 2018, or August 2018 if you were really pessimistic.

Well, that never happened.

A year after the second target month, though, Musk noted that they could have basically cheated/gamed it and done the drive in 2018 (we’ll have to take his word for it), but that customer cars with Full Self-Driving (FSD) would really, really be able to make the autonomous journey later in 2019.

Also, by the way, back in a March 2017 TED Talk, Musk said he thought that Tesla owners would be able to go to sleep in their Teslas in about two years rather than having to drive them (in 2019).

Well, I bought my Tesla Model 3 in mid-2019, and I can tell you that I still can’t go from LA to NYC fully autonomously in it and I can’t go to sleep in the car while it drives itself.

Musk also said in November 2018 that Tesla cars would probably be capable of self-delivering themselves to customers at the end of 2019, as long as regulators let them.

Well, we don’t have that capability yet, more than 5 years after that target time, but we did get news today that Tesla vehicles are driving themselves on Tesla’s own property from the factory in California to where they will be loaded onto semi trucks — a little more than a mile away.

There are a lot more statements about the expected progress of Tesla Full Self-Driving and robotaxis we could bring up, but I think that’s enough for now.

The question I have here is: why did Elon Musk make all these statements? A lot of people think he just lied in order to con people and jack up the Tesla stock price. I don’t think that’s the case. I think Musk believed these things. If that was the case, though, one has to ask why he believed those things. Supposedly, he was one of the world’s leading experts on autonomous driving hardware and software. One would have thought that he could see clearly the progress being made, the barriers remaining, and how long it would take to overcome them. Clearly, he was massively off — by almost a decade now.

I don’t have an answer to the question. But these are some key general conclusions I can come up with:

• He thought the problem was much simpler than it was.
• He was overconfident that the method his team was using would be able to achieve the goal — and completely incorrect on that.
• He perhaps did not understand well enough how their AI worked and how quickly it could improve.
• He was eager to make ambitious, arrogant claims about things he wanted to see happen.

Today, in Tesla’s shareholder letter, the company (i.e., Elon Musk) wrote: “2025 will be a seminal year in Tesla’s history as FSD (Supervised) continues to rapidly improve with the aim of ultimately exceeding human levels of safety. This will eventually unlock an unsupervised FSD option for our customers and the Robotaxi business, which we expect to begin launching later this year in parts of the U.S. We also continue to work on launching FSD (Supervised) in Europe and China in 2025.”

So, in other words, Musk is making the same claim in January 2025 about late 2025 that he made in May 2017 about late 2017. One can certainly say the technology is much better today, and it’s easier to imagine the claim being true. However, it’s still not close to robotaxi ready, and one has to wonder if Musk is making the same mistakes today that he made in 2016 and 2017 (and 2018 and 2019, etc., etc.). Is it finally almost here, just 7 years late? Or are we going to have another 7 years of such claims and missed targets?

My concerns are still that 1) Tesla FSD has a “see-saw problem” that cannot be resolved (or at least not so quickly) with Tesla’s current software approach, and 2) the hardware being used isn’t adequate for robotaxi-level self driving either. I don’t know what I don’t know, though, so I’m not claiming anything. However, we have to acknowledge that Musk is not trustworthy on this topic and has made incorrect claims along the same lines for about 9 years.

It reminds me of the old line, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”