‘No Question’ Tesla Has Capability to Do Coast-to-Coast Autonomous Drive, It Says

Though Tesla didn’t keep the promise CEO Elon Musk made a year ago to complete its first “coast-to-coast” autonomous drive from Los Angeles to New York using Autopilot by the end of 2017 (see 1708030004), the automaker has the capability to do so for demo purposes, said Musk on a Wednesday-evening earnings call. If Tesla were to “pick a specific route and then write code to really make that route work, we could do a coast-to-coast route drive, but that would be kind of gaming the system,” said Musk. He also doesn’t want to take the Autopilot team away from its task of building on the “fundamental safety of the existing features,” he said. In its advanced development role, the team is teaching Autopilot to “do things like recognize traffic lights and stop signs and make hard right turns and that kind of thing, but it's not at the safety level that's considered OK for release,” he said. “You want many lines of reliability for anything that's released to end customers. So I don't want to take the team off that until we feel like we've really got everything as best we can for the core functionality.” There’s “no question you can kind of build a demo around this stuff,” said Vice President-Engineering Stuart Bowers. “The challenge right now for the team is just increasing the safety and utility of Autopilot to over 250,000 cars we have today and pushing more out after that.” Tesla’s strategy for the next six months will be to deploy the tools the team is working on “in the form of active safety features,” using “this rich understanding of the environment to actually try to keep you safer, to either beep or brake,” said Bowers. One “huge advantage” for the team is that it “can understand what humans actually did in these vehicles and test our software to make sure that we would have made decisions that were similar, if not safer,” he said. “That's going to be a huge part of what we do over the next, probably, two quarters.” Musk said the team is focused on making “some significant advancements in autonomy, and then once that's out and stable, I think that could be a good time to work on the coast-to-coast drive.”