Level-Five Teslas in 2021?

Business Insider’s Mathias Döpfner did a long new interview with Elon Musk. It covers a lot, and most of it isn’t too relevant to DT, but this Musk quote is: “I’m extremely confident that Tesla will have level five [self driving] next year, extremely confident, 100%.” Yes, this definitely isn’t the first time Musk has claimed full self driving is just around the corner, but my slightly contrarian take (from a few months ago) is that I actually do think Tesla will get to a useful level of self-driving — deployed at scale in consumer cars — first. Their big bet years ago that vision (without LIDAR) is enough for autonomy has enabled them to be years ahead of the competition with their dataset. They’ve harnessed their fleet of Telsas on real roads for very clever sampling, feedback loops (ghost mode), and regression testing; Andrej Karpath, (Tesla’s head of AI, had a really great talk on all this in April last year.