Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, has recently commented that he is promoting his company’s plans to be able to have its first fully autonomous cars ready. at the end of this same year. It is a very important fact, but we must interpret it correctly so as not to get confused or make serious mistakes.
The first thing we must bear in mind is that we are talking about fully autonomous cars, that is, with a higher degree of autonomy than the current Tesla models have. To understand each other, today all Teslas that include Autopilot have a level 3 autonomous driving degree, which means that they have all the necessary hardware to drive automatically, and the results they offer are generally good, but they keep the driver’s position and he must be alert to take back control of the car when necessary.
Everything we have said in the previous paragraph implies that Teslas do not actually offer fully autonomous driving, and that still depend on the figure of the driver to a greater or lesser extent. Well, what Tesla is referring to when he talks about fully autonomous cars at the end of the year is the jump to level 4 of autonomous driving, where the car will no longer need our intervention.
However, we must be clear that this level does not yet respond in the strict sense to full autonomous driving, since driving position will be maintained in most cases, due to the limitations that this level will still present, since it may not work if all the requirements and conditions are not met, and this without a driver’s position as an option could cause the car to end up leaving us stranded .
The true degree of autonomous driving is the level 5. This will mark the total disappearance of the driving positionand the car will be able to function in any circumstance and condition, that is, it is equivalent to that level that we have seen in movies and other works of science fiction, in which vehicles controlled by artificial intelligence are able to function as well as they would in the hands of a human.
The technology of the car is advancing at an incredible rate. Today the most important driving assistance functions, framed in the automated driving levels 1 and 2 (braking and lane change assistant, among others) are already present in most of the cars that are marketed today, and it may be that with the jump to level 4 that process of democratization of level 3 autonomous driving.
