Tesla Self Driving Tech. available to Rivals

Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, stated at the Tesla AI Day event that the business may license its Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology to other automobile manufacturers as well. He went on to discuss the latest breakthroughs behind the company’s contentious autonomous driving system in great detail.

Musk has argued for years that Tesla’s self-driving technology is safer than having a human behind the wheel. However, US authorities initiated a formal inquiry into the company’s Autopilot technology earlier this week, following almost a dozen Tesla vehicle crashes that resulted in 17 people being injured and one being killed.

When asked if Tesla would commit to open-sourcing its software, Musk replied: “Well, it is fundamentally extremely expensive to create the system, so somehow that has to be paid for. Unless people want to work for free.”

“But I should say that, if other car companies want to license it and use it in their cars, that’d be cool. This is not intended to just be limited to Tesla cars.”

The approach would allow competitor automakers to add some level of autonomous driving capability to their models without having to invest the huge amounts of money necessary to design such a system from scratch.

It’s widely believed that totally autonomous vehicles will not be available for decades, and that complicated legal issues would need to be resolved before such technology is allowed on a global basis.

As for Tesla’s next-generation technology, Musk claims that it will be able to achieve full self-driving at a safety level that is far higher than that of a human, potentially by at least 200 percent or 300%. He went on to say that: “Obviously, there will be future hardware for Full Self-Driving computers too, which we’ll probably introduce with Cybertruck, so maybe in about a year or so. That will be about four times more capable, roughly.”

A month earlier, Musk revealed that non-Tesla vehicles would have access to Tesla’s Supercharger network for the first time later this year, which is widely considered as the world’s most reliable and widely available network.