Elon Musk says he didn’t expect creating self-driving cars would be ‘so hard’

“The difficulty is obvious,” tweets Tesla CEO


 Musk participates in a ‘fireside chat’ at the National League of Cities Summit in Los Angeles last month (Reuters)
 (Reuters)

Elon Musk has admitted that delivering full self-driving software has been harder than he anticipated, to a chorus of both complaints and encouragement on Twitter.

“Generalised self-driving is a hard problem, as it requires solving a large part of real-world AI. Didn’t expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect,” he tweeted on Saturday.

The Tesla CEO’s post also appeared to reference the fact that the company has a string of missed deadlines for releasing the Full Self-Driving (FSD) software behind it.

“FSD 9 beta is shipping soon, I swear!” he wrote.

Tesla was scheduled to bring a Full Self-Driving system to market in 2018 and 2019, but is yet to deliver. More recently, Musk has referenced a “feature-complete” system that still requires some input from the driver.

This system is now Tesla’s Full Self-Driving Beta, which has been rolled out to a very limited selection of early-access owners.

Many of the responses to Musk’s tweet were from fans begging to be given access too.

“If it’s good enough for 2,000 beta testers it’s good enough for me. Let those of us who are ok with the risks of an unfinished version opt-in,” said Twitter user @On_Tesla

Others made fun of Musk’s repeated promises that the new release was just weeks away.

“Which one is sooner, Two Weeks or Shipping soon?” asked @vratanpara

“I will train my children to be testers in case I pass away before it ships” posted @WholeMarsBlog

Full Self-Driving Beta will be based on the company’s new strategy of using camera vision rather than radar sensor readings to increase the accuracy of the software.