Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Monday he expects fully autonomous cars, without human safety monitors, to become more widespread in the United States later this year, after already being introduced in Texas.
Speaking via video link to the Smart Mobility Summit in Tel Aviv, Musk said there were self-driving cars operating in Texas without safety monitors and that this would be expanded nationwide this year.
Tesla, which has been facing a slowdown in vehicle sales, operates robo-taxis in Austin, Dallas and Houston. However, Reuters reporters who tested the vehicles said the service was affected by long wait times and sometimes no availability at all. In addition, the delivery points on some trips were far from the passenger’s actual destination.
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Last November, Tesla received a permit to operate a ride-hailing service in Arizona.
However, Musk — who has made bold predictions about autonomous vehicles for more than a decade, many of which have not come to fruition on his timeline — remains optimistic that human-free cars will be ubiquitous within a decade.
‘Five years from now and certainly ten years from now… probably 90% of all distance traveled will be driven by artificial intelligence in a self-driving car,’ he said. ‘So in ten years it will be quite a niche thing to actually drive your own car.’
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Tesla is recalling 218,868 vehicles in the US due to delayed rearview camera images that could increase the risk of crashes, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said this month.
Last week, Alphabet-owned Waymo recalled about 3,800 robo-taxis in the United States after identifying a risk of the vehicles entering flooded roads with higher speed limits, raising safety concerns.
Musk also told the summit that his rocket and satellite maker SpaceX was close to developing reusable rocket launch systems, a breakthrough that would reduce the cost of spaceflight.
‘Maybe we can do that this year,’ he said. “When this technology is developed, it will be a fork in the path of human history where we can become a spacefaring civilization.”
Musk also said that later this year, his brain implant company, Neuralink, will make its first implant with the Blindsight device to help people who were born without vision or with impaired vision to see.
“It will give them, initially, limited vision, but I think over time, very accurate vision, maybe super, super human vision,” he said, adding that the company was also working on developing technology to allow paralyzed people to walk again.
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Musk said he believes that, within a decade or so, humanoid robots will be ‘pretty much everywhere’ and that because they are productive, this will likely drive economic growth with ‘universal high income’.
