Here we go again: Elon Musk once again took to the stage in front of an assembly to announce in all seriousness that the next Tesla will drive itself.
There is no longer any season my good lady, we no longer know how to dress, everything is out of step, we no longer have any landmarks: not a drop of rain for weeks (until this morning), the storks have already returned to Alsace and Elon Musk has just announced that the next Tesla will be able to get rid of its driver when it is barely March and it was May 2022 that I wrote a similar article. He then assured a Brazilian assembly that he would have self-driving cars in his range within a year, which, 10 months later, seems extremely badly off.
This time, it was during a brief appearance yesterday at a conference at Morgan Stanley that he certified that Tesla’s next-generation platform will be able to operate autonomously. I’m sorry, that’s not exactly what he said: in an “almost autonomous” way exactly, which introduces a kind of Schrödinger emancipation that is not unlike the three-year-old child who cries out to be able to do all alone on condition that we hold his hand.
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It’s actually a long tradition that has been repeated since 2016, culminating in the famous release of 2019 which predicted the arrival of one million robotaxis by the end of 2020. Yet, seven years later and precisely as was already the case at the time, the latest evolution of the famous “Full Self-Driving Beta” system still does not exceed level 2 of autonomous driving in the nomenclature defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) which has 5 and that Eric Dupin recently represented us here. This does not prevent the American manufacturer for years from charging € 7,500 for its “fully autonomous driving capability” with the writing below in small print that “the current functionalities […] do not make the vehicle autonomous”.
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