Tesla investing is an adventure. You never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes, for instance, the richest person on Earth and Tesla CEO Elon Musk posts a video of himself in a self-driving Tesla navigating to the house of Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg, possibly to challenge him to hand-to-hand combat.
During the drive, Musk pointed out that Tesla engineers didn’t program what to do with speed bumps, stop signs, or roundabouts. All things the car handled well on its own. Tesla trained the system with video and the car learned for itself. It’s an example of Tesla using artificial intelligence to build its self-driving products.
The car performed well. Barron’s counted one intervention. Musk had to take over at a stoplight where the car started to proceed straight on an advanced green for left turns. That, of course, means the system still needs driver supervision 100% of the time. Still, the drive is impressive. It was also a beautiful, sunny day in Palo Alto. Weather and light can also impact self-driving systems.
Google, however, doesn’t seem to have the right address for Zuckerberg in Palo Alto. The two didn’t meet up. Musk believes that self-driving cars will be hug, for the company. “Being able to do a software update and have several million cars suddenly go from manual driving to autonomous, I think will be the single biggest asset value increase in history,” said Musk at Tesla’s May annual meeting of shareholders. He has said similar things several times.