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Tesla Will Have Self-driving Cars In Just Two Years, Elon Musk Boldly Declares (fortune.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In a new interview with Fortune, outspoken Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the electric automaker is just two years away from developing fully autonomous vehicles that can operate ably and safely in any type of environment. While Musk has long championed an automotive age filled with self-driving cars, this is the most optimistic timeline for their deployment we've seen Musk make yet. In fact, Musk in 2014 said the requisite technology to manufacture a self-driving car was still about five to six years away. "I think we have all the pieces," Musk said, "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. It's a much easier problem than people think it is."
More context:
“We’re going to end up with complete autonomy, and I think we will have complete autonomy in approximately two years.” That doesn’t mean city streets will be overflowing with driverless Tesla vehicles by 2018 (coincidentally, the company’s Model 3 should be on roads by then). Musk expects regulators will lag behind the technology. He predicts it will take an additional year for regulators to determine that it’s safe and to go through an approval process. In some jurisdictions, it may take five years or more, he says.
Of course, now they are putting more computers in each car, and then embedding the VIN of the car in the code running each CPU, to make it that much harder to replace said computers when they fail.
That's not new, but eventually people figure out how to root that out. Bosch ME 5.4 and below are all fully open now, for example, including rewriting immobilizer codes. Using a $10 eBay cable and a netbook, I can theoretically the codes on mid-to-late-nineties Kraut cans in just a couple of minutes. Or, they redevelop the modules. The factory service manual typically includes literally all the information needed to implement workalikes. The good news is that automakers tend to use the same modules over and over again. The Bosch ABS 5 computer in my A8 is also the same as in contemporary A6 and Passat, and probably other modules, and there's no coding because it's fully adaptive. The only modules that tend to get coded to the car are the cluster, PCM, and TCM, perhaps the security module, and maybe the BCM but usually not.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"