Elon Musk’s Missed Full Self-Driving Targets Are Even Wilder Than I Remembered

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There’s been a little debate going on lately about whether Tesla Full Self-Driving is “effectively” Level 4 autonomous driving or is still just a Level 2 driver-assist system. Yesterday, I shared a comment from a reader explaining that it’s actually Level 2++ now. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, there’s another reader comment that deserves some attention.

I’ve covered a number of times that Elon Musk’s predictions for when Tesla would implement true, unsupervised, full self driving have been off for about a decade. And they continue to be off. However, just how off they were more than 10 years ago is something I didn’t fully remember.

Here’s the full comment from longtime reader “delphi23,” bringing us way back to January 2016:

“I think we will probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year,” Musk said on July 23, 2025

How many years do you add for each of the Musk prediction qualifiers: “fairly confident”, “quite confident”, “probably” etc.

I remember Musk in 2016 predicting a Model S going coast to coast “by the end of 2017”. And he was asked if that would include charging and he responded yes (“When clarifying how a cross-country trip would work without a human driver to plug the car in, Musk referenced automated charging technology“). Anyway, 9 years later it appears to have taken place, only with humans doing the charging.

A January 2016 tweet said:

“Ultimately you’ll be able to summon your car anywhere… I think that within two years, you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is… and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey.”

We have mentioned that coast-to-coast trip several times, but I completely forgot that Musk also talked about charging in that way. Of course, there was the old Tesla “snake charger” prototype, and it was assumed Tesla would look to roll those out across the country to charge self-driving vehicles. But we’ve only ever really seen the one.

Perhaps people didn’t expect the coast-to-coast trip and automatic chargers to be more than a marketing ploy using a specific route and just a handful of specially deployed snake chargers, not something broadly possible, but then that next claim about being able to summon your car from across the country was clearly a consumer product prediction. By 2018, Tesla drivers were supposed to be able to summon their cars from across the country and their cars would just drive to them! So much for that.

Has Tesla Full Self Driving (Supervised) gotten much better? Yes, it has. But how can anyone trust any of Musk’s predictions or plans when he’s more than a decade off like this when discussing matters that are a big part of his company’s products and services?

Thanks to delphi23 for bringing this up. Indeed, what do the qualifies “fairly confident” and “quite confident” and “probably” actually mean when they come from Elon Musk?

Oh, coming back to current Tesla FSD being Level 2++ rather than Level 4 autonomous driving, here’s that comment from Steve Shaw again explaining why that’s the case, and some of the reasons why you still can’t summon a Tesla car from across the country:

“It is true that Tesla’s general model means that data helps everywhere, not just in Austin. That’s likely part of why FSD (Supervised) in consumer cars has improved. And it should mean they can roll out robotaxi service faster over time. AFTER we see hundreds of cars making many trips per day in several Texas cities. So far, it is still unproven.

“The analyst’s points are a great description of what is colloquially referred to as ‘L2++’: Driver assist that is often able (in good weather) to drive the car, BUT the human driver must remain alert, ready to intervene at any instant, sometimes without warning. Perhaps is close to L3 in limited conditions, such as a divided highway (in good weather).

“The other points relate to whether Tesla is close to ‘safe enough for a robotaxi fleet’, in some cities. Maybe. A fleet is a controlled situation: we know from recent exposé that Tesla had ‘data labelers’ mark every important feature in Austin for months. This was then fed into AV training data, to increase ability of robotaxis to recognize what they need to recognize. I consider that a substitute for MAPPING a city: prior information about what is where.

“IMPORTANT: We’ll likely soon see boasting about how quickly Tesla has gone from a small number of robotaxi miles, to 10 million miles — WITHOUT a mention that most of those miles are from the 500 cars in SF area, that operate with a human driver. Registered as a normal (non robo-) human taxi service. Proves nothing. Each quarterly report and tweet continues this MISLEADING mingling of driverless and drivered ‘robotaxi’ miles!

“HOWEVER, it is a long ways from robotaxi services to consumer L4. Too many variables once it is in people’s hands. I personally won’t trust an ‘almost L4’ that lacks LOCAL MAPS and RADAR (and/or LiDAR). No reason for an AV to be as blind as a person in bad weather!

“If I was in government and had the authority, I would require all consumer self-driving modes to include direct reporting to the government agency of such incidents. That is, built into the dash, would be an option, after the car is stopped, for the person to describe what happened such that they had to intervene. If we had those reports, our varied opinions about what Tesla has achieved would not be needed. We’d know what Tesla knows, about how far they are from safe autonomy.”

Yup.