Tesla Motors founder/CEO/madman-in-chief Elon Musk is feeling bullish on self-driving cars: He just told The Wall Street Journal that his all-electric car company will have autonomous vehicles six years from now, and they will run circles around foolish human drivers.
In an interview with WSJ, Musk highlighted the safety improvement he foresees in us handing over the wheel to our robot overlords. “They will be a factor of 10 safer than a person [driving] in a six-year time frame,” he said.
Musk may be super-optimistic about the technological feasibility of self-driving cars, but he told WSJ it could take several more years after the tech is perfected to work out the legal hurdles. Musk said Tesla is engineering its own autonomous driving tech along with some auto industry partners, though he declined to name them.
The CEO’s predictions seem particularly optimistic given the current state of autonomous car technology, which still can’t handle a good many of the challenges we human drivers face every day. Will Musk and his Tesla engineers be able to suss it all out in the next six years? Guess we’ll just have to wait and see. [WSJ]