Tesla can’t promise driverless cars in 2021, engineer tells California DMV

Tesla can’t promise driverless cars in 2021, engineer tells California DMV

The interior of a Tesla Model S is shown in autopilot mode in San Francisco, California, U.S., April 7, 2016.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk's messaging around driverless vehicle technology does not always "match engineering reality," according to meeting notes by the California Department of Motor Vehicles released late Thursday.

Tesla employees, including the company's director of Autopilot Software, CJ Moore, and associate general counsel, Eric Williams, could not confirm to the California regulators that Tesla would be able to produce a truly driverless vehicle this year, despite the CEO's guidance that it would.

In a January 2021 earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said he was "highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year."

At an Axel Springer award ceremony in December 2020, Musk said, "I'm extremely confident of achieving full autonomy and releasing it to the Tesla customer base next year." The moderator asked him if he was talking about Level 5 autonomy, and Musk nodded and said "Yes, yes."

A team from the California DMV Autonomous Vehicles branch, led by Chief Miguel Acosta, asked Tesla employees about Musk's messaging regarding so-called "Level 5," or fully driverless, technology during a March 9 meeting. The correspondence was