Tesla To Have Complete Autonomous Capability In 6 Months, Elon Musk Says

Driverless car technology has been a bit of a touchy issue for Tesla since last year when fatal car accidents were blamed on the Autopilot feature. The company has recovered from the incident somewhat and now, Elon Musk is making waves by saying that Tesla vehicles will be capable of complete driverless functionality within six months.

While other cars and tech experts are saying that fully driverless vehicles are years if not decades away, the exceedingly ambitious Tesla Motors CEO is saying that it can be done in half a year, Futurism reports. At least, this is what he wrote in a reply on Twitter when asked about the issue of self-driving cars.

Right now, Tesla is one of the leading companies that are producing semi-autonomous vehicles that are already on the road. Since they were first unleashed out into the streets, the company has also been making steady improvements on the features, with the latest updates massively boosting the responses and capabilities of Autopilot.

In a recent report by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) when looking into the fatal car accidents involving the company’s Model S with the driverless technology onboard, the agency noted how good the safety protocols were. Basically, the NHTSA concluded that Autopilot was working as intended and Tesla had already installed numerous safety features in the vehicle that cut car crashes involving its models by up to 40 percent.

Then again, the definition of full self-driving capability wasn’t explicitly defined by Musk, thus leaving it open to interpretation. There is no indication as to what level on the autonomous driving scale it will have based on the system set up by the Society of Automotive Engineers, Forbes notes.

The scale ranges from 0 to 5, with 0 being absolutely no autonomous driving capability and 5 being completely driverless without the need for a steering wheel. Given the amount of time that Musk indicated, attaining level 4 might be more likely since Tesla wouldn’t be in a hurry to remove drivers from the equation completely.