At Tesla's Nov. 6 annual shareholders meeting, CEO Elon Musk made a big promise about the brand's full self-driving (FSD) features, Electrek reports, and the assertion was met with widespread skepticism and concern.
What's happening?
In addition to voting on a controversial pay package for Musk, potentially worth $1 trillion, the CEO also updated shareholders on ongoing projects, including the Cybercab.
On the FSD front, Musk teased another possibly startling feature in the very near future — the ability for Tesla drivers to "text and drive," something he mentioned anecdotally in January. A brief clip of Musk's "texting and driving" remarks was shared to Reddit's r/TeslaFSD.
"You know, the car's a little, uh, strict about keeping your eyes on the road," Musk began.
"Um, and, uh, but I'm confident that in the next month or two, we're gonna look closely at the safety statistics, but we will allow you to, um, text and drive essentially," he added, not going into details.
To Musk's left, a screen displayed video of Tesla interiors, and as he mentioned the purported texting-while-driving feature, it showed a woman texting in a self-driving car.
Why is this important?
If ever a proposed Tesla feature was a "can of worms," it's very possibly this one.
Broadly, texting while driving is expressly illegal in nearly every jurisdiction in the United States, as well as abroad. Montana is the only state without a ban, and Musk didn't address how Tesla might handle potential legal hurdles.
Musk has also been known to vastly underestimate timelines for certain Tesla features, particularly with autonomous driving. For example, he promised that Teslas would be capable of driving autonomously from Los Angeles to New York by 2017.
In 2019, Musk confidently predicted a million Tesla robotaxis would be on the road by 2020. While driverless Waymos launched in 2020, Tesla struggled to debut a handful of supervised robotaxis in Austin this summer.
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Would you buy a self-driving car? Click your choice to see results and speak your mind. |
Absolutely! 👍 As Electrek and Engadget both pointed out, the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defined six "capability" levels of autonomous driving, outlined on a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) chart.
According to Engadget, Tesla is "currently capable of level 2 autonomous driving," whereas "Musk is promising at least a level 4 capability." Separately, the NHTSA recently launched an investigation into Tesla's FSD in response to lawmakers' calls for oversight.
Coupled with Musk's assertion that Tesla's "texting while driving" would be rolled out in "a month or two," it was unsurprising that users on the FSD subreddit took the claim with a grain of salt.
"So a couple years," one replied.
"I find a good rule of thumb is to multiply his timelines by 10," another wrote.
What's being done about it?
Ultimately, a string of broken promises from Tesla could harm EV adoption.
However, EV-curious drivers now have a much wider range of options as legacy automakers embrace a fully electric future.
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