Tesla doubles-down on autonomy: Elon Musk says ‘full self-driving’ prototype launching in a month

Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk has doubled down on self-driving technology, saying his company’s financial future is dependent on autonomous technology, and saying he launch a “full self-driving” prototype in a month.

“It’s clearly going to work,” Musk says, pointing out the giant strides the company has made in teaching its vehicles to identify road conditions 

“If you look at the future value of Tesla, it will be total vehicles produced multiplied by the value of autonomy,” he told investors.

“It’s hard for people to judge the progress of Autopilot. I drive the bleeding edge of Autopilot, and so I have an insight into what is going on.

“We were improving, but the improvements were trailing off and not getting to where they needed to be. We had to do a fundamental rewrite of the entire autopilot software stack, and all the labelling software as well.

“We are now labelling in 3D video, and it’s hugely different to previously, where we were labelling bunch of single images form different cameras. It made it, in some cases, impossible to label, and the labels and a lot of errors. 

“I think we’ll hopefully release a private beta of the full self-driving version of Autopilot in a month or so, and people will understand the magnitude of the change, it’s profound.”

His comments come as the company reaffirmed its focus on driver safety at its annual shareholder meeting, with Musk defining Tesla’s goal of shrinking the road accident to tally to a 10th of the its current position.