Elon Musk Says Tesla Vehicles Will Be Fully Autonomous In Two Years

Will Tesla be the first to bring fully autonomous vehicles to our roads? According to the company’s outspoken CEO, Elon Musk, it will produce a fully self-driving vehicle that can operate in any condition and on any road in the next two years.

“I think we have all the pieces, and it’s just about refining those pieces, putting them in place, and making sure they work across a huge number of environments—and then we’re done,” Musk told Fortune in an interview. “It’s a much easier problem than people think it is. But it’s not like George Hotz, a one-guy-and-three-months problem. You know, it’s more like, thousands of people for two years.”

Hotz recently received attention when he announced that he built a self-driving car in his garage in approximately one month. He described the vision chip technology that was developed by Mobileye, and is used by Tesla, as “absurd”, adding that Musk had proposed offering him a lucrative contract if his technology outshined Mobileye. Tesla responded by saying that it is sticking with Mobileye, while disagreeing with some of the statements that Hotz made about self-driving cars.

“Demoware is easy; production software is hard,” said Musk. “It’s easy to do a cool demo, it’s hard to put something out. Especially software that’s going to work on millions of different roads all around the world in a wide range of circumstances—in winter, in summer, in rain, in dust—there’s a world of difference there. George is an amazing hacker, but you don’t make production software by hacking. A hack does not work, a hack crashes.”

Initially, a Tesla employee suggested Hotz as a possible recruit to the company, with Hotz telling Musk that he would come up with a vision solution that was superior to Mobileye’s.

“I expressed some skepticism here, like, look Mobileye has got hundreds of engineers and they’ve been working on this problem for quite a while and I think they’re pretty smart guys,” explained Musk. “He wanted to make a bet, and he said ‘well how much is that worth to you?’ And I said, ‘well I mean if it were true, it would be worth millions of dollars, but I don’t think it’s true.”

The bet concept was that a car using Hotz’s solution would be able to stay in its lane for the length of Interstate 405 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. However, ultimately, Musk declined the challenge as he suspected that although it would be able to work for one stretch, he didn’t believe that the product would work on all roads and highways overall.

Tesla is certainly not alone in its determination to bring self-driving vehicles to the general public. The majority of major automakers are working on varying degrees of autonomous driving technologies, from assisted braking and other semi-autonomous functionality to full-fledged self-driving cars. Although Google is testing a fully autonomous prototype that it hopes to commercialize by 2020, most automakers are moving towards fully self-driving cars in stages. Recently, Tesla’s autopilot service allowed the company to take a great leap forward when it was rolled out in October, providing drivers with computer-assisted parallel parking, steering and lane changing on highways, as well as an upgraded side collision warning system.

While Tesla’s announcement that it expects to bring fully autonomous vehicles to the public in the next two years is exciting, it’s important to note the many challenges that exist beyond perfecting the technology, such as governmental allowance, the determination of insurance liability, and overall consumer acceptance. Will all of these components be in place within the next two years?