Elon Musk’s Missed Full Self-Driving Targets Are Even Wilder Than I Remembered 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 How many years do you add for each of the Musk prediction qualifiers: “fairly confident”, “quite confident”, “probably” etc. I remember Musk in 2016 predicting a Model S going coast to coast “by the end of 2017”. And he was asked if that would include charging and he responded yes (“When clarifying how a cross-country trip would work without a human driver to plug the car in, Musk referenced automated charging technology“). Anyway, 9 years later it appears to have taken place, only with humans doing the charging. A January 2016 tweet said: “Ultimately you’ll be able to summon your car anywhere… I think that within two years, you’ll be able to summon your car from across the country. It will meet you wherever