Elon Musk ‘Surprised’ If Tesla FSD Isn’t ‘Unsupervised’ by Next Year, Predicts Regulatory Shift

Elon Musk foresees Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology becoming "unsupervised" by next year, reflecting his confidence in the system's development.

Annual Predictions from Musk

According to Elon Musk, it would catch him off guard if Tesla doesn't implement "unsupervised" self-driving technology by the end of the year.

You should likely disregard this part of Musk's self-driving schedule, though.

Known for his annual predictions, Musk has stated that Tesla will achieve self-driving capabilities "by the end of the year" since 2019, per Electrek.

On the conference call after Tesla's financial numbers for Q2 2024 were released, the CEO departed from his recent cautious approach to making such projections.

Supervised FSD in Practice

In the United States and Canada, Tesla is currently implementing what they term "supervised Full Self-Driving" in their "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) packages. It does all a driver needs it to do automatically, but it's not flawless, so drivers still need to be alert and prepared to take over if necessary.

Once it's safe to do so and authorities permit, Tesla promises to make it "unsupervised" self-driving with a software update.

According to Musk's statement today, he is optimistic that this can be accomplished this year. If not, he expressed his astonishment that it won't happen next year.

Once again, the CEO is expressing confidence that this would convince regulators to authorize Tesla's FSD for unsupervised driving, arguing that it is safer than human drivers. For Tesla's current fleet of vehicles, this would mean activating the feature.

North American Focus

So long as you're talking about North America. There is still no "unsupervised" FSD in Asia and Europe.

Regarding that matter, Musk elaborated by saying that, in his opinion, such markets will have FSD supervision before the year ends.