Tesla’s autonomy event: Impressive progress with an unrealistic timeline

Enlarge (credit: Getty / Aurich Lawson / Tesla)

There’s an old joke in the software engineering world, sometimes attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs: “the first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”

On Monday, Tesla held a major event to show off the company’s impressive progress toward full self-driving technology. The company demonstrated a new neural network computer that seems to be competitive with industry leader Nvidia. And Tesla explained how it leverages its vast fleet of customer-owned vehicles to collect data that helps the company train its neural networks.

Elon Musk’s big message was that Tesla was close to reaching the holy grail of fully self-driving cars. Musk predicts that by the end of the year, Tesla’s cars will be able to navigate both surface streets and freeways, allowing them to drive between any two points without human input.