Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously thinks bots will drive us around.
On Wednesday, he took that long-running vision of autonomy a step further. During the automaker’s earnings call, Musk predicted that Tesla itself would dominate how passengers get around — so long as pesky regulators don’t get in the way.
“I think Tesla will end up doing a majority of all passenger miles on Earth in any country where it is allowed to operate freely,” he said. “And you can come back and look at this prediction, but I feel confident about this prediction.”
He said Tesla’s biggest hurdle to world domination is foreign governments blocking autonomous tech “to protect a domestic industry.”
That is a bolder statement than Musk’s prior autonomy predictions.
During a January earnings call, he said the “vast majority of miles traveled” would eventually be autonomous and guessed that people would manually drive fewer than 5% of miles. That prediction left other autonomous competitors — Waymo, Zoox, Ford, GM, Rivian, etc. — in the fray.
Vehicle autonomy is core to Tesla’s valuation story. The company says its future lineup will include only one vehicle that drivers can operate manually: the high-priced Roadster.
In September, the company started rolling out the steering-wheel-less Cybercab for ride-hailing in Texas.
That rollout has had its fits and starts. While Tesla says it’s ramping production and preparing to launch Cybercab rides in Florida, the NHTSA issued an audit inquiry hours after the car’s public release to probe the automaker’s self-certification.
Musk, who has described his predictions as his “best guesses,” has missed several recent timelines for Tesla’s autonomy rollout — including a prediction that unsupervised autonomy would ramp across the US in 2025.
Now, Tesla has a new target date for the consumer launch of its full self-driving software. On Wednesday, Ashok Elluswamy, the company’s VP of AI, said unsupervised FSD is coming “somewhere around Q2 next year.”
Tesla didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
