PALO ALTO, CA — Elon Musk is once again making waves with a bold prediction about Tesla’s long-delayed Full Self-Driving (FSD) system.
Speaking at Tesla’s quarterly earnings call late Tuesday, Musk declared that FSD will achieve “true, unsupervised autonomy” within six months — a timeline he has echoed repeatedly since at least 2018. Musk described the forthcoming update, version 17.9, as “a quantum leap” and claimed that Tesla vehicles would soon be able to “safely and reliably drive anywhere, anytime, with zero human input.”
The announcement sent Tesla shares up 8% in after-hours trading, though many analysts and industry observers reacted with skepticism.
“It’s Groundhog Day,” said Dr. Leah Kim, a professor of AI systems at MIT. “Every year we hear the same six-month promise. Autonomy remains an incredibly complex challenge, and camera-only systems still face fundamental limitations.”
Musk’s FSD software continues to rely heavily on camera-based vision, a controversial design choice that eschews LiDAR and radar — tools favored by most of Tesla’s competitors. Musk insists that “humans drive with eyes and a brain; we’re just doing the same thing with silicon.”
Yet despite a decade of development and over 600 beta iterations, FSD remains classified as SAE Level 2 automation — requiring constant driver supervision. Several high-profile accidents, including the 2029 pileup in Phoenix and the 2031 crosswalk fatality in Seoul, have drawn attention to the system’s edge-case blind spots.
Regulators in the U.S. and EU have not approved FSD for unsupervised operation. A spokesperson for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a statement Wednesday reminding the public that “no vehicle available for purchase today is fully self-driving.”
Tesla fans on X (formerly Twitter) rallied behind Musk, with hashtags like #FSD2032 and #InElonWeTrust trending overnight. Meanwhile, critics pointed to a montage of Musk’s past autonomy predictions — dating back to a 2015 tweet that promised “sleeping in your Tesla by 2018.”
Musk brushed off the criticism during a post-call interview on TeslaNet Live:
“People said the same thing about reusable rockets. Then we did it. They said EVs couldn’t scale. We proved them wrong. FSD is coming. Buckle up.”
Whether this latest six-month countdown leads to a breakthrough or another moving goalpost remains to be seen. But as one Reddit commenter quipped, “The only thing fully autonomous at Tesla is Elon’s optimism.”