Elon Musk Compares Human Drivers To Horse Riders Come 2037

There’s no doubt that the world appears to be going head first towards the road of automation in terms of vehicles. Practically every major car company is working on driverless cars, with Tesla being one of the leaders. However, tech renegade Elon Musk recently went a step further by basically saying drivers with non-autonomous vehicles by 2037 are comparable to horse riders.

Now, there really isn’t anything wrong with riding a horse in this day and age, provided it's done recreationally as opposed to being the main mode of transport. After all, very few people in the modern world ride horses to work on a daily basis. Speaking to dozens of governors last Saturday, this is exactly the comparison that Musk made of vehicles without driverless technology, Inverse reports.

The event was held in Rhode Island, where the Tesla CEO said that half of the cars in the US will likely be electric units in ten years. Musk also noted how China will have penetration even beyond that, simply because the government is quite supportive of EV projects.

As for autonomous vehicles, the tech billionaire predicts that over that ten-year period, almost all vehicles in production would have some kind of driverless technology onboard. Musk isn’t saying that there will no longer be non-autonomous cars for sale. They would simply be in the minority, production-wise.

“It will be rare to find one [driverless cars] that is not, in ten years. That’s going to be a huge transformation,” Musk said.

During that time, there will still be vehicles in the market and on the roads that don’t have self-driving capabilities, Futurism notes. Musk has no illusions about this, but he also says that they would be in the vast minority over the next two decades.

“It will be like having a horse. People have horses, which is cool. There will be people who have non-autonomous cars, like people have horses,” Musk explained. “It would just be unusual to use that as a mode of transport.”