Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla Motors Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) has promised that all cars it produces in future will have the capacity to be driverless.
A demonstration drive of a fully self-driving Tesla from Los Angeles to New York will happen by the end of next year, Musk added.
The electric vehicle will drive, recharge and park itself without human input, he said.
In a news conference, Musk said it made sense to start to fit the tech into its cars now rather than wait for regulatory approval and then do it.
“They will be at the highest level of autonomy,” he said with all of the hardware needed for full self-driving capability at a safety level “substantially greater than that of a human driver."
Tesla’s move into the autonomous driving has been dogged by controversy including one fatality earlier this year in the US, when the driver was using its semi-autonomous “Autopilot” mode.
Musk criticised what he said was excessive coverage of that accident and contrasted it with the 1.2mln people who die every year in car crashes.
Cars produced from now on will contain multiple sensors, eight cameras and software that effectively made it a supercomputer, he said.
Exhaustive testing in real-live situations will be carried out before the system went live and until then the software would operate in a shadow mode, where the action it would have taken in certain situations is recorded and monitored.
Tesla is not alone in developing driverless technology, though. Ford, BMW, Google and even taxi software firm Uber are all working intensively on vehicles that eliminate the need for a driver.