'Long term, the only manually driven car will be the Tesla Roadster': Elon Musk says future lineup is going to be almost entirely autonomous

• Musk makes big admission during latest earnings call
• CEO hints that we might see Roadster in a “month or so”
• Tesla also announces an upgraded AI4 chip

During the company's Q1 earnings call, Tesla’s CEO stated that most of the company’s production “long term” will be the two-seater Cybercab and that anyone thinking of physically taking control of driving duties will have to look towards the long-awaited Roadster model.

“Over time, it’s going to make sense for our whole lineup to be autonomous vehicles of different sizes,” Elon Musk stated. “In fact, long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he added.

The vehicle in question has been touted for release since 2017, when the company started taking deposits for an all-new two-seat electric sports car.

During that time, Tesla’s CEO has claimed that it will be able to tackle the 0-60mph sprint time in 1.9 seconds and hinted that it would use technology derived from SpaceX to “fly” for short periods of time.

But during this year’s earnings call, Musk pushed back the launch of the Roadster once again, claiming that the company will be able to debut the car in “a month or so”.

“I think it might be one of the most spectacular demos ever,” he said, despite not giving any further details on when we will see it or when it is slated to go into production.

Analysis: The goal posts continue to move

Musk’s vision of a fully-autonomous future is currently causing the company headaches, as a number of Tesla owners have started taking legal action against the company's historic Full Self-Driving claims.

During the recent earnings call, Musk finally admitted that “Hardware 3 simply does not have the capability to achieve unsupervised FSD,” despite previous promises to customers that it would.

He went on to state that the company is exploring the possibility of building “micro factories or small factories” in major metropolitan areas to upgrade older HW3 cars to HW4. Although there were no further details on how this would work.

Yet during the same call, Musk also stated that the AI4 chips are also going to rapidly be replaced by more competent technology.

Seeing as the company’s recently unveiled next-gen AI5 chips won’t be going into vehicles any time soon, instead being funneled into Optimus robots, Tesla is now planning an AI4 Plus upgrade to its self-driving computer that doubles the RAM from 16 gigabytes to 32 gigabytes per chip, taking the total to 64GB, which is in line with the latest automotive processors from Nvidia.

But read between the lines and it appears that while HW4 with the AI4 Plus chip is likely more than enough to continue running Supervised Full Self-Driving, it isn’t powerful enough to take the leap to Unsupervised — a goal that Tesla has been working towards for years and the promise that attracted millions of customers in the first place.

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