"without touching the wheel"
He initially said it in the context of the driver not needing to touch the wheel but then later he clarified that he thinks they'll be close to enough 9s of reliability to not need anyone in the car by the end of the year.
Q: Any update on Full Self-Driving? I think you had said a couple of quarters ago it would be available by the end of the year. Is that still possible? Would it still be a level 4 / level 5 that you’re talking about? And are there any sort of regulatory hurdles you’d have to think about?
A: As I said earlier, we’re expecting to release the Full Self-Driving software to anyone who orders the package by the end of this year. It’s a separate matter as to “will it have regulatory approval?” — it won’t have regulatory approval at that time. But the car will be able to take you from your home to your work, to your friend’s house, to the grocery store without you touching a wheel. So it’s looking very good.
Q: And it would mean level 4 / level 5 kind of traditional definition you’re talking about?
A: Well, there's a debate as to “what are the interventions per mile?” — and of those, safety interventions per mile. We’re not saying that it’s quite ready to have no one behind the wheel. It’s just that you will almost never have to touch the vehicle controls. So when I came to Giga Texas today from a friend’s house, I never touched any of the controls all the way here.
And then there is a longer process of what's called the march of 9s of how many 9s for reliability do you need before you could really be comfortable saying that the car could drive with no one in it. And that’s some subjectivity as to how many 9s you need. But I think we’ll be pretty close to having enough 9s that you can have no one in the car by the end of this year. And certainly without question, that's where we are in my mind next year. I think we’ll also have enough data next year to be able to show to regulators that the car is safer — much safer than the average human.
every update is.
