June 2014: "I am confident that in less than a year you will be able to go from highway on ramp to highway exists without touching any controls." -
Tesla’s 2014 Shareholder meeting [video]
December 2015: "We're going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years." -
Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Drive Themselves in Two Years
January 2016: "In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY" -
Elon Musk on Twitter
June 2016: ""I really consider autonomous driving a solved problem," he said. "I think we are probably less than two years away." -
Two years until self-driving cars are on the road – is Elon Musk right?
March 2017: "I think that is about two years" -
Transcript of "The future we're building -- and boring"
watch out, someone will say that you've misquoted him and taken his statements out of context
Lol. Judge for yourself.
December 2015:
"We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years." That doesn't mean city streets will be overflowing with driverless Tesla vehicles by 2018 (coincidentally, the company's Model 3 should be on roads by then). Musk expects regulators will lag behind the technology. He predicts it will take an additional year for regulators to determine that it's safe and to go through an approval process. In some jurisdictions, it may take five years or more, he says.
Musk adds an important caveat—one that raises the standard of what it means to achieve full autonomy. "When I say level 4, I mean level 4 autonomy with the probability of an accident is less than that of person," he says.
Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Drive Themselves in Two Years
For the June 2016 event, the media seems to have multiple different quotes for the same statement. When I have the time I'm going to have to manually go through the video and get the direct quote.
Full video: SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk at Code 2016
June 2016: "I consider autonomous driving to be a basically solved problem," he said. "We're less than two years away from complete autonomy. Regulators however will take at least another year; they'll want to see billions of miles of data."
Elon Musk Just Made These 5 Bold Claims About the Future
June 2016: "I think we are less than two years away from complete autonomy – safer than humans – regulations should take at least another year."
Elon Musk did everything but confirm that Tesla Model 3 will be fully autonomous [Video]
March 2017:
16:49
CA: So leaving aside regulation for a second, in terms of the technology alone, the time when someone will be able to buy one of your cars and literally just take the hands off the wheel and go to sleep and wake up and find that they've arrived, how far away is that, to do that safely?
17:06
EM: I think that's about two years. So the real trick of it is not how do you make it work say 99.9 percent of the time, because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you're probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn't be, certainly.
17:31
It's never going to be perfect. No system is going to be perfect, but if you say it's perhaps — the car is unlikely to crash in a hundred lifetimes, or a thousand lifetimes, then people are like, OK, wow, if I were to live a thousand lives, I would still most likely never experience a crash, then that's probably OK.
17:53
CA: To sleep. I guess the big concern of yours is that people may actually get seduced too early to think that this is safe, and that you'll have some horrible incident happen that puts things back.
18:04
EM: Well, I think that the autonomy system is likely to at least mitigate the crash, except in rare circumstances. The thing to appreciate about vehicle safety is this is probabilistic. I mean, there's some chance that any time a human driver gets in a car, that they will have an accident that is their fault. It's never zero. So really the key threshold for autonomy is how much better does autonomy need to be than a person before you can rely on it?
Transcript of "The future we're building -- and boring"
The criteria seems to have shifted in time. Back initially, Elon was talking about level 4 and simply probability of accident better than a human (from other thread this is a crash in ~350k miles or ~2-3 crashes per lifetime).
More recently there is talk about level 5 (I remember this mentioned in the FSD event) and talk about crashes in multiple lifetimes.
