Tesla CEO Predicts Driving Will Become Illegal

Never one to shy away from making bold statements, Tesla CEO Elon Musk dropped another one today during a technology press conference.

Speaking at the NVIDIA GPU conference, Musk talked about autonomous vehicles and how self-driving cars will be the way of the future. So much so he believes that humans will be outlawed from driving once self-driving cars become commonplace. In recent years, automakers around the world have been investing into self-driving technology and many plan to introduce similar features into their vehicles within the coming years. Musk compared autonomous technology to an elevator saying, “There used to be elevator operators, and we developed some circuitry … The car is going to be just like that.”

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He said the technology is “much easier than people think” and believes a fully autonomous driving system can be produced as soon as next year. Musk also believes that autonomous driving will save a lot of lives but acknowledges the major issue will be adoption and acceptance with the general public. While the technology will be readily available in the coming years, the biggest hurdle will be getting only autonomous vehicles on the roadways. “There’s 2 billion of them,” Musk said referring to how large the automotive industry is. The eccentric CEO thinks it will take about 20 years for nearly all vehicles on the roadways to be self driving.

Following the conference, Musk issued out a tweet saying, “To be clear, Tesla is strongly in favor of people being allowed to drive their cars and always will be. Hopefully, that is obvious.” Unfortunately, it appears technology is on a path that will leave no option if self-driving cars prove to save a significant number of lives.

[Source: Car and Driver]

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