Tesla said today during its Q2 2023 earnings call its Full Self-Driving (FSD) system is leaps and bounds ahead of the competition. So much so that Tesla is in early talks with a major automaker to license the technology.
Elon Musk emphasized the future of autonomous vehicles and Tesla’s unique position in achieving it in the Q2 2023 earnings call. He stated that Tesla’s long-term focus on autonomy will significantly drive vehicle demand and volume. This will primarily be due to Tesla’s future robotaxi products, which Musk believes could see quasi-infinite demand.
He further pointed out that the way these robotaxis will be manufactured is revolutionary. The design, made in a revolutionary way, will be the highest units per hour of any vehicle production ever.
Musk also explained the importance of training data for their Autopilot and Dojo projects. They believe the more training data you have, the better the AI performs. Tesla is in a unique position because they have more vehicles on the road collecting this data than all other companies combined, possibly by an order of magnitude.
He expressed doubt that any other company could replicate Tesla’s success, even with similar software and computers, if they didn’t have access to Tesla’s training data. He also stated that their Dojo training computer is designed to significantly reduce the cost of neural net training and is optimized for video training.
Musk was confident about FSD becoming ten times safer than an average human driver, asserting that Tesla is at the cutting edge of AI development with its Autopilot, Dojo computer, inference hardware in the car (referred to as Hardware 3, 4), and Optimus robot.
As for the part where Musk mentioned licensing FSD? Here’s exactly what he said: “And we are already in discussions with — early discussions with major OEM about using Tesla FSD. So, we’re not trying to keep this to ourselves. We’re more than happy to license it to others.”
Who do you think this major automaker is? Ford was the first to adopt Tesla’s North American Charging Standard (NACS), and that set off a domino effect of other automakers such as GM, Rivian, Volvo, Polestar and Nissan today. Who’s next?
Musk revealed that by the end of next year, they hope to reach an in-house neural net training capability of 100 exaflops. To date, over 300 million miles have been driven using FSD (Full Self-Driving) beta. This number is expected to grow exponentially soon, reaching billions and then tens of billions of miles.
Tesla also announced earlier today it will allow a one-time transfer of FSD to another vehicle—but only in Q3.