Musk says Tesla cars are 'very close' to full autonomy

For years, Musk has made bold claims about enabling full autonomy in Tesla cars.

The company has made significant hardware and software changes geared towards achieving this goal but has only been able to offer, what is generally considered to be, Level 2 autonomy, where the driver has to be ready to take control of the wheel at any time.

During a recent Q&A session at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC), Musk claimed that the company will be able to make its vehicles fully autonomous by the end of this year.

"I'm extremely confident that Level 5, or essentially complete autonomy, will happen and I think will happen very quickly," Musk said. "I feel like we are very close."

Musk added that the company will be able to achieve basic requirements for Level 5 autonomy through a future software update, and no new hardware.

"We will have the basic functionality for Level 5 autonomy complete this year," the billionaire said, noting that "there are no fundamental challenges remaining."

Now, this would be a major push for the ecosystem of self-driving vehicles.

Musk noted that Tesla is training its systems (with data gathered from on-road vehicles) to detect and handle unexpected situations people could face on the road.

"You have to have the system figure out and train to deal with these odd situations," he said. "This is why you need the kind of real-world situations. Nothing is more complex and weird than the real world."

Even when Level 5 autonomy is activated, Tesla would be pushing out OTA updates to improve self-driving performance.

This, as Musk explains, is because even after you address small problems and put the system together, a "long tail" of issues keeps cropping up. Those issues would have to be addressed dynamically to be able to handle a "vast majority of situations" on road.