Tesla expects to have fully self-driving cars in which humans won’t have to touch the steering wheel around the second quarter of 2020.
The company made the declaration during an investor meeting at its Palo Alto, California, headquarters Monday, in which it highlighted its bold but risky bid to modify Tesla’s electric cars into driverless vehicles.
CEO Elon Musk informed investors that the company’s computer to allow its electric cars to become self-driving vehicles is controlled by the best processing chip globally.
Tesla had never made its own computer chip. It hired an ex-Apple engineer three years ago to design a computer chip. Musk boasts the chip is better than any other in the industry “by a huge margin.”
Experts state they’re critical whether Tesla’s technology has advanced anywhere near to the point where its vehicles would be able of being driven solely by a robot, without a human in position to grab control if something goes awry.
“It’s all hype,” stated Steven E. Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley who has been associated in attempts to create autonomous driving for 45 years. “The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn’t have it and neither does anybody else.”
