In Tesla’s 1st Quarter earnings conference call, in January, CEO Elon Musk said he was “highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of humans this year”.
However, in a recent memo published by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, states that Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) told a Californian regulator that the full self-driving technology, may not be achieved by the end of this year.
In the same memo, Tesla also indicated that they “are still firmly in L2”.
The apparent reason for this is the exceptionally increase in demand for Tesla vehicles, which have led them to be already sold out for this quarter, with almost two months still left.
After rolling out the “beta” version of the “full self-drive” program since October, Musk bragged about its capabilities in a tweet.
The memo stated that “Elon’s tweet does not match engineering reality as per CJ (CJ Moore- autopilot engineer). Tesla is at Level 2 currently”. Level 2 tech is semi-automated and requires supervision by human driver.
As compared to last quarter’s record production of 1,80,338 vehicles, Tesla is expected to have a slightly higher production capacity this quarter.
The biggest contributors are expected to be the restart of ‘Model S’ production and an increase in ‘Model Y’ production, in Shanghai and Fremont.