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Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, has made plenty of bold predictions. They don’t always come true.On Monday, Musk said the company was on the cusp of making cars that could drive themselves safely on any road. He also promised that the company would begin operating a fleet of driverless “robo taxis” by the end of next year.
“I’m very convinced,” Musk said in a presentation to analysts at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif. “In the future, people will want to outlaw people driving their own cars because they’ll be unsafe” compared with autonomous vehicles. Many auto executives and analysts think Musk is being wildly optimistic and say cars that can drive themselves at all times are at least several years away. “The idea that you can have a vehicle that can make complex decisions for full self-driving is just not plausible at this point,” said Mike Ramsey, a Gartner analyst.
If Ramsey is correct, it wouldn’t be the first time Musk has gotten ahead of himself. The chief executive once forecast that Tesla would make 500,000 cars in 2018, but it produced half that many. Last summer, he said Tesla would make 10,000 Model 3 sedans a week — about twice the number currently coming off the assembly line. Musk had also promised a Model 3 for $35,000, which spurred tens of thousands of people to put down $1,000 deposits long before production had started. Tesla recently began making that car, but customers can order it only on the telephone or by visiting a store, not online, the way most customers prefer to buy its cars.
In the presentation on Monday, Musk and other executives described the technologies that the company is developing to allow cars to drive themselves, building on the Autopilot system that it has offered for several years. He said Tesla had developed “the world’s fastest computer” for use in self-driving cars, able to conduct 144 trillion operations per second.
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