Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.
There’s been a little debate going on lately about whether Tesla Full Self-Driving is “effectively” Level 4 autonomous driving or is still just a Level 2 driver-assist system. Yesterday, I shared a comment from a reader explaining that it’s actually Level 2++ now. I’ll come back to that in a minute, but first, there’s another reader comment that deserves some attention.
I’ve covered a number of times that Elon Musk’s predictions for when Tesla would implement true, unsupervised, full self driving have been off for about a decade. And they continue to be off. However, just how off they were more than 10 years ago is something I didn’t fully remember.
Here’s the full comment from longtime reader “delphi23,” bringing us way back to January 2016:
“I think we will probably have autonomous ride-hailing in probably half the population of the U.S. by the end of the year,” Musk said on July 23, 2025
