Elon Musk Says Autopilot Needs 6 Billion Miles Before Regulations | Inverse
Now at 5 billion miles.
Tesla’s global fleet reaches over 5 billion electric miles driven ahead of Model 3 launch
Hopefully, 6 billion miles by the end of the year. Full autopilot driving may be done by the end of the year IMO. In fact, Elon said a demonstration will be done using a Model S from NY to CA by the end of this year.
Elon Musk says a Model S will drive itself from New York to LA this year
TSLA touching 450 IMO by then if macros and guidance are in line. (Not an advice)
I like the optimism, and having used autopilot for a 60 mile drive during an overnight test drive, I'm all in favor of sooner than later for autopilot to be a reality. (It made for a big reduction in the fatigue from the drive).
However the two cited articles have two different (though related) ideas. The first is a year go, Elon thinking that it would take 6 billion miles on autopilot to achieve worldwide regulatory approval.
The second article is total miles driven by all Tesla vehicles. Unclear from the article, but I think the 42k miles on my Roadster odometer would be included in those miles (along with the mileage for all Roadsters). Pretty clearly to me from the second article, all of the pre-autopilot Model S' are included in those miles.
Putting the two articles next to each other implies that we are 83% of the way to full self driving with worldwide regulatory approval. I claim that is misleading. Even if we fudge the Tesla fleet miles down to 3B of autopilot miles, that would imply that we're 50% of the way to worldwide regulatory approval (I don't believe that, but I could be wrong of course).
My own guess is that we've got at least another year for the first regulatory district to provide approval for full self driving (vehicle in control and responsible, no driver in car).
I consider that to really be too aggressive, with another 1-3 years of lots of companies doing lots of testing and pilot projects, with cars becoming increasingly autonomous but with humans sitting behind the wheel and monitoring. Even the cross country demonstration will be exactly that - a technology demonstration. It'll be really cool for them to get into the car in LA and have it park itself at each supercharger along the way (wait for human to plug it in and then unplug it). The car will still have a human behind the steering wheel, even if they don't do anything for several days while driving cross country.
There's still a LOT of work to go from LA to NY technology demonstration completed one time, to worldwide regulatory approval.
My guess - 60 Billion autopilot miles isn't enough for worldwide regulatory approval. 600 Billion might not be enough, but worldwide regulatory approval is a pretty high bar to clear.
The good news for all of us as Tesla investors is that nobody is accumulating miles at anything like the pace Tesla is. Considering the mechanism Tesla has in place, we WANT the problem to take 600 Billion miles or even 6 Trillion miles. Because the only company with a solution in place to economically accumulate that level of training data / experience is Tesla. If that's the standard, then nobody else has yet started on an economic path to accumulate that level of machine experience.