It’s no secret that self-driving cars are difficult to develop, but apparently, it’s something Tesla CEO Elon Musk is just now realizing. In a recent tweet replying to someone complaining about Tesla endlessly delaying its Full Self-Driving capabilities, Musk’s excuse was that “self-driving is a hard problem.”
Every Tesla comes with Autopilot features included for free. Autopilot assists drivers with certain aspects of the driving experience, such as automatic steering, accelerating, and braking within a single lane. For a cool $10,000 upgrade, Tesla shoppers can add the Full Self-Driving package that enables additional autonomous features — including automatic lane changes, automatic parking, and more. An attentive driver is still required for most of these features to work, but even so, Tesla has been insistent on labeling it ‘Full Self-Driving.’ Along with the misleading name, Tesla’s rollout of Full Self-Driving has been a bit of a nightmare. The FSD system was made available as part of a beta update in October 2020, but that’s only after Musk promised (and failed) to launch it in 2019 and 2018.
Tesla’s next focus for FSD has been the big version 9 update. It was supposed to launch early this year, but as of June 2021, it’s nowhere to be seen. After Twitter user @BLKMDL3 complained about the update’s constant delays, Musk replied with the following: “Haha, FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear! Generalized self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect. Nothing has more degrees of freedom than reality.”
Why Musk’s Comments Have Received So Much Backlash
As already noted above, Musk tends to promise a lot of things and then never deliver on them. It’s exciting that FSD is available in beta for people to use, but the fact that it was only first available in October 2020 after people were promised a 2018 release is hard to overlook. This can also be seen with Musk promising that an FSD subscription would be a “sure thing” in May, but once again, there’s still no trace of it. It’s understandable that companies have to delay product launches every now and then, but years of Musk failing to follow through on his word has made it difficult to take anything he says without a huge grain of salt.
With this response, in particular, people are taking issue with Musk blaming FSD version 9’s delay on the fact that self-driving is ‘hard.’ While he’s not wrong, that’s also like saying it’s difficult to go to Mars because it’s so far away — everyone knows that. Some Twitter users have mocked Musk with responses like “tHiS iZ hArD,” whereas others say they “appreciate all you guys do.”
Even with Musk swearing that FSD 9 is shipping “soon,” there’s no way of telling when that’ll actually be. FSD 9 could arrive next week, a month from now, or in the first half of 2022. One can certainly hope it launches sooner rather than later, but if Musk has proven anything, it’s that “soon” can mean anything.
