Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk on Friday hinted that it is now taking longer to find issues with the company's full self-driving (FSD) driver assistance software while staying mum on reports of its robotaxi event being delayed.
What Happened: Tesla relies on the miles between two human interventions in the operations of its FSD technology as a marker of progress. But as FSD gets better, it drives longer without interventions, thereby increasing the testing time it takes to figure out if a new version is better than the existing one, Musk said on Friday about the difficulties in progressing the technology.
The amount of testing time it takes to figure out if the new AI is better than the existing AI as measured by miles between interventions is the limiting factor on progress.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 12, 2024
The better FSD gets the longer it takes to find interventions.
FSD is aimed at achieving vehicle autonomy in the future and is expected to be the operating technology for Tesla's robotaxi product. However, the technology, as of today, requires active driver supervision.
Why It Matters: Musk's comments on longer testing times come on the heels of reports that the company is postponing the unveiling of its robotaxi to October from the CEO's previous timeline of August.
Bloomberg on Thursday reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that the postponement of dates is to allow teams working on the project to build more prototypes. Neither Musk nor Tesla has confirmed the report but the news led Tesla shares to close down 8.4% at $241.03 on Thursday.
The stock is down nearly 3% year-to-date, according to data from Benzinga Pro.
Late last month, Musk said that Tesla delayed rolling out a new version of FSD owing to issues with driving smoothness.
The company trained the new version too much on interventions and not enough on normal driving, leading to a loss of driving smoothness, the CEO said. "It's like a doctor training too much on patients in the emergency room vs training on preventative care," he wrote.
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