Elon Musk says Tesla might achieve fully autonomous driving 'later this year'

It's easy to forget amidst the Twitter/Threads drama, but Elon Musk is still CEO of that car company, Tesla.

And he's still promising that fully autonomous, unsupervised self-driving is coming soon, even though he missed the mark on numerous occasions before.

Speaking at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China on Thursday, (via Electrek) Musk said that he thinks Tesla is "very close to achieving full self-driving without human supervision" and will "achieve full self-driving, maybe what you would call (level) four or five, I think later this year."

Musk is referring to SAE standards for fully autonomous driving, where Level 4 is near-autonomous driving, with the car being able to drive itself without driver intervention in some situations, while Level 5 is full autonomy, with the car being able to drive itself basically anywhere and in all conditions.

Right now, Tesla's Full Self-Driving driving assistance package is still essentially at Level 2, with the car helping out in certain scenarios, but the driver having to be alert and ready to take over in all situations.

Level 4 and 5 autonomy are far more advanced, including scenarios such as typing navigation instructions into the car and then going to sleep while the car drives itself to the destination (the difference being that a Level 5 can do it everywhere and in all conditions). Mercedes-Benz has offered Level 4 self-driving in Germany, but only in one extremely limited scenario, while Level 5 hasn't been offered by any company in a commercially available car yet.

Speaking in Shanghai, Musk admitted that he's been "wrong about this prediction in the past," but he also says he feels Tesla is "closer to it than we ever have been." He's not kidding about being wrong. In 2016, he said it was coming "in about 5.5 years." In 2017, he said Tesla would be able to have a car drive autonomously, from U.S. coast to coast, in 3-6 months (a 2016 video of a Tesla performing a similar feat was staged). And since 2019, he kept promising that a more advanced version of Tesla's Full Self-Driving package, which is currently in beta, would arrive soon (it's unclear how close that final version of FSD will be to Level 4 or Level 5 autonomy).

In any case, it's July, so Musk's "later this year" timeline is quite aggressive. We'll find out whether Tesla can do it this time soon enough.