Tesla's Elon Musk: Our fully autonomous cars are now 'very close'

Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the car manufacturer will have the "basic functionality" to deliver level 5 autonomous driving this year. Bloomberg and Reuters report that Musk said Tesla was "very close" to bringing out fully autonomous driving capabilities. He made the claim in a prerecorded video shown at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. "I'm extremely confident that level 5 or essentially complete autonomy will happen and I think will happen very quickly," said Musk. "I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year." SEE: An IT pro's guide to robotic process automation (free PDF) (TechRepublic) In April last year, Musk said Tesla would probably have fully autonomous driving by the end of the year and that he would be "shocked" if it didn't by the end of 2020 at the latest, at which point "having a human intervene will decrease safety". From the beginning of this month, Tesla sells its Autopilot Full Self-Driving (FSD) for $8,000, up from $7,000.