There’s been a little debate going on lately about whether Tesla Full Self-Driving is “effectively” Level 4 autonomous driving or is still just a Level 2 driver-assist system. Yesterday, I shared a comment from a reader explaining that it’s actually Level 2++ now. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, there’s another reader comment that deserves some attention. I’ve covered a number of times that Elon Musk’s predictions for when Tesla would implement true, unsupervised, full self driving have been off for about a decade. And they continue to be off. However, just how off they were more than 10 years ago is something I didn’t fully remember. Here’s the full comment from longtime reader “delphi23,” bringing us way back to January 2016: “I think we will probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year,” Musk said on July 23, 2025 How many years do you add for each of the Musk prediction qualifiers: “fairly confident”, “quite confident”, “probably” etc. I remember Musk in 2016 predicting a Model S going coast to coast “by the end of 2017”. And he was asked if that would include charging and he responded yes (“When clarifying how a cross-country trip would work without a human driver to plug the car in, Musk referenced automated charging technology“). Anyway, 9 years later it appears to have taken place, only with humans doing the charging. A January 2016 tweet said: “Ultimately you’ll be able to summon your car anywhere… I think that within two years, you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever your phone is… and it will just automatically charge itself along the entire journey.” We have mentioned that coast-to-coast trip several times, but I completely forgot that Musk also talked about charging in that way. Of course, there was the old Tesla “snake charger” prototype, and it was assumed Tesla would look to roll those out across the country to charge self-driving vehicles. But we’ve only ever really seen the one. Perhaps people didn’t expect the coast-to-coast trip and automatic chargers to be more than a marketing ploy using a specific route and just a handful of specially deployed snake chargers, not something broadly possible, but then that next claim about being able to summon your car from across the country was clearly a consumer product prediction. By 2018, Tesla drivers were supposed to be able to summon their cars from across the country and their cars would just drive to them! So much for that. Has Tesla Full Self Driving (Supervised) gotten much better? Yes, it has. But how can anyone trust any of Musk’s predictions or plans when he’s more than a decade off like this when discussing matters that are a big part of his company’s products and services? Thanks to delphi23 for bringing this up. Indeed, what do the qualifies “fairly confident” and “quite confident” and “probably” actually mean when they come from Elon Musk?
