Elon Musk Says Massive Effort Required To Get To 99.9% Safety In Driverless Cars

(RTTNews) - Tesla Inc. (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has admitted that it requires a "massive effort" from the part of the luxury electric car maker to reach 99.99% safety for its driver-less cars.

In a tweet on Sunday, Musk said, "Intersections with complex traffic lights & shopping mall parking lots are the two biggest software challenges. Developer branch already mostly works in these scenarios, but massive effort required to get to 99.9999% safety."

In April, Tesla released its plans to have over 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020. On Sunday, he reiterated the plan on twitter, "This is why it's possible for Tesla to have a million robotaxis by end of 2020 if we upgrade existing HW2 fleet of ~500k & make at least ~500k FSD cars."

"All HW2+ cars are upgradable to full self-driving capability with Tesla FSD computer & all production in past few months has FSD computer," he added.

Musk said the company will start fitting its new, more powerful processing chip into older vehicles near the end of the year. Tesla claims the new FSD chip offers 21 times the performance of the Nvidia chips it replaces. The FSD chip upgrade will be offered for free to any Tesla owners who have paid for the company's "Full Self-Driving" add-on package, which costs $6,000.