Tesla claims that they will have fully autonomous self-driving on the road by next year.
Elon Musk is confident that Tesla will achieve full self-driving in 2019, ahead of any other EV Autonomous car manufacturer. In fact, so confident is he that he said he would be very surprised if any of the other car manufacturers will exceed Tesla in self-driving. He said:
"I don’t want to sound overconfident, but I would be very surprised if any of the car companies exceeded Tesla in self-driving, in getting to full self-driving,"
"They’re just not good at software. And this is a software problem."
Elon Musk does admit though, that Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car division, is Tesla's nearest competitor although he doesn't believe anyone comes close to Tesla "in terms of achieving a general solution."
"You can definitely make things work like in one particular city or something like that by special-casing it,"
"But in order to work, you know, all around the world in all these different countries where there’s, like, different road signs, different traffic behaviour, there’s like every weird corner case you can imagine. You really have to have a generalized solution. And to the best of my knowledge, no one has a good generalized solution."
Musk also talked of their most advanced feature in the latest release of the carmaker's Autopilot self-driving software (version 9), Drive on Navigation. He continued:
"That’s [drive on navigation] I think one of the first major steps toward full self-driving,"
"It’s pretty wild. It’ll overtake a slow car. It’s basically integrating navigation with the Autopilot capability."
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