Tesla has a self-driving strategy other companies abandoned years ago

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

An overhaul to Tesla’s Autopilot webpage might represent the clearest acknowledgment yet that the company has failed to deliver on Elon Musk’s ambitious vision for a self-driving future.

“You will be able to summon your Tesla from pretty much anywhere,” Musk wrote in July 2016. “Once it picks you up, you will be able to sleep, read or do anything else enroute [sic] to your destination.” Indeed, he predicted, Tesla customers with full self-driving capabilities will be able to have their cars join a ride-hailing network in order to “generate income for you while you’re at work or on vacation.”

In January 2016, Musk predicted that Tesla cars would be able to drive autonomously coast to coast “in ~2 years.”