With overly ambitious schedules, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is already the namesake for the new word “Elon Time“That is supposed to transport that times of the electric car and Rocket entrepreneur are not to be taken too literally. Most recently, he even exceeded his own deadlines – the Gigafactory in China was Finished faster than announced and the Model Y market launch brought forward, In one of Tesla’s most ambitious projects, however, the old rule still seems to apply: Musk has now postponed an important intermediate goal for autonomous driving, which should be reached at the end of 2019, to an indefinite date.
Soon
– Buff Mage (@elonmusk) January 11, 2020
By the end of the year, all the sub-functions required for fully self-driving (FSD) would have been fully developed, he said Tesla CEO explained in a podcast interview in May 2019, He used the technical term “feature complete” from software development. As a Reddit user explains, it means that all functions planned for a specific project have been programmed and tested and meet the criteria defined for them; the quality does not necessarily have to be sufficient for a broad publication.
Musk confirmed his announcement in October 2019. “Feature complete” means that Tesla electric cars can use autopilot to “drive their owners from home to work, most likely without any intervention”, he explained at a conference call, In fact, Tesla already had that in the United States at that time new function “smart summon” introduced, which allows independent driving through parking lots without people behind the wheel.
Together with the “Navigate on Autopilot”, which has been available for some time, this means that Tesla’s electric cars have become autonomous both in parking lots and on highways in the USA (but the driver remains responsible). The only gap left was city traffic. And because Musk did a software update with a shortly before Christmas “Preview” of real FSD for first Tesla owners announced, there was a brief impression that he and his company had almost achieved this ambitious goal as announced.
But then the update came, and It was disappointing in terms of autonomy: The cars equipped with it have been showing ever since Stop signs, traffic lights and some other objects but not, for example, speed limits. There were initially no further comments from Musk, which led some observers to suspect that he had said goodbye to the “feature complete” goal by the end of the year.
A recent Twitter statement by the Tesla CEO confirms this impression: “Soon,” he replied on the second weekend in January when he asked a user when the full FSD functions could be expected to be released. For the time being, Musk left it open how exactly this time is to be understood and which sub-functions of FSD are still missing.
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