Tesla Chief Elon Musk disclosed the electric vehicle giant’s plans to spend over $10 billion for its autonomous driving program in 2024 alone.
This significant development came after Tesla officially ended the FSD’s Beta testing and rebranded it as Full Self-Driving (Supervised).
Elon Musk’s investment estimate
Elon Musk’s $10 billion+ investment estimate for its autonomous driving push was a sheer response to an electric vehicle enthusiast’s series of X posts about its advanced driver-assist systems’ training process.
Impressively, Tesla has been progressive in training its fleet of self-driving cars lately, especially after the FSD suite achieved the cumulative milestone of more than 1 billion miles.
Now, the Tesla boss estimates that the company will invest more than 10 billion this year alone in training computing, data pipelines, and video storage.
“Pretty much.
It has been staggeringly difficult to make generalized self-driving work, requiring all that you describe above and more.
The investment in training compute, gigantic data pipelines, and vast video storage will be well over $10B cumulatively this year…”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Minimal compared to Tesla’s fleet investment
Despite the enormous $10 billion+ investment estimate, CEO Musk emphasized that it remains minimal compared to the $250 billion investment Tesla invested in its fleet. For context, the majority of this fleet is expected to achieve full autonomy in the future.
“…But that is nothing compared to the ~quarter trillion dollars in cars on the road with Tesla-designed AI inference computers being trained by their drivers.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
It is also worth mentioning that Tesla may not need to enable its electric cars to communicate with each other as the cameras’ input would be sufficient to support the neural nets, as suggested by TSLA investor @sobieski902.
Apple’s mishap
CEO Musk’s estimate of $10 billion+ in autonomous driving program investment will undoubtedly yield significant advancement, especially considering that the company has already built 6 million+ EVs.
This major investment could also be worth it, as the FSD suite is already earning some revenue, but it is currently limited.
American tech giant Apple has reportedly invested $10 billion in the past 10 years as it sought to develop and produce its promised autonomous electric car. However, the company recently announced its decision to ditch its electric vehicle plans to make way for its generative AI exploration.
In contrast, the Musk-led company plans to spend the same amount to advance its self-driving car initiative. Of the two major businesses, Tesla is undoubtedly the one with the most potential to deliver a fully autonomous electric car.
Tesla recently announced that the Robotaxi will finally make its debut on August 8, marking a significant advancement in the company’s efforts to launch a car without controls for a human driver to use.
