Elon Musk Is Confident Tesla Will Reach Level 5 Autonomy in 2021

Photo: William Walker/Motortrend

Elon Musk is confident that Tesla will reach Level 5 autonomy in 2021, as from a technical point of view. Active work is underway, and the results are very positive.

In July 2020, at the World AI Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he was confident the company "will have the basic functionality for Level five autonomy complete this year [2020]." According to this statement, in November 2020, a limited number of Tesla car owners received FSD Beta, which could drive the car without driver intervention. Although FSD Beta is still not perfect and requires constant attention from drivers, basic functionality for Level 5 autonomy has been achieved. This achievement allowed Tesla to expand the number of testers from 13 to 1,000 in two months of testing and several software improvements.

During the Q4 2020 Earnings Call, Musk, answering an investor's question, confirmed that Tesla will achieve Level 5 autonomy in 2021.

Investor question:

"Why are you confident Tesla will achieve Level 5 autonomy in 2021?"

Musk's answer:

"I guess, I'm confident based on my understanding of the technical roadmap and the progress that we're making between each beta iteration."

Musk explained that Tesla cars can already travel from one place to another through a series of difficult intersections, but the main difficulty lies elsewhere. He said that now it is only about "improving the corner case reliability and getting it to 99.9999% reliable with respect to an accident." The company "needs to get it to better than humans by a factor of at least 100% or 200%." However, this happens quickly because Tesla has a lot of training data given the number of vehicles in the field. Therefore, the software is improving dramatically.

Tesla's goal now is to transition over the neural networks in the car to video. To achieve this, Tesla's hardware uses only eight cameras, and software ultimately has to convert information into surround video. When we look at images of an event, we see only separate images—but when we watch a video, this gives us a complete understanding of what happened, and we can correctly and objectively assess it. The same thing happens with Tesla cars, which "see" in 4D. When Tesla cameras capture images, they combine them with time (4th dimension) to create surround video.

"So you've got 8 cameras operating simultaneously with synchronized frame rates. So you've got 8 frame surround video - 8 camera surround video. And then you've got to label basically everything in that video snippet and then train against that and have those neural nets operate the car."

Musk said he did see this as a question of getting work done. And anyone can see the results in the rapidly improving beta versions of FSD Beta, the videos of work of which can be found on the Internet. Tesla is going to further expand the number of people who will have access to FSD Beta, which demonstrates the improvement of this feature.

"So from my standpoint, it looks like a very clear and obvious path towards a vehicle that will drive 100% safer than a person. Yes. I really don't see any obstacles here."

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