Musk clips track missed FSD timeline

Tesla’s current self-driving product says the driver must stay in charge, a sharp contrast with years of Elon Musk promises now resurfacing in social clips. (tesla.com 1) (tesla.com 2) Tesla’s Full Self-Driving page says the system works with “active supervision” and “does not make the vehicle autonomous.” The owner’s manual says drivers must remain attentive and ready to take over at all times. (tesla.com 1) (tesla.com 2) That language sits against a long record of specific Musk targets. In October 2016, he said a Tesla would drive from Los Angeles to New York without a single touch by the end of 2017. (nbcnews.com) (techcrunch.com) In April 2019, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road in 2020. CNBC reported at the time that Tesla still had not shown the coast-to-coast hands-free drive he had promised earlier. (cnbc.com) Tesla has since moved some autonomy claims from the consumer car to a separate ride-hailing service. Its 2025 annual report says the company launched Robotaxi in June 2025, and Tesla’s current Robotaxi page says rides are available in Austin, Dallas and Houston. (sec.gov) (tesla.com) That does not mean ordinary customer cars are fully autonomous. Tesla’s support page says FSD is a driver-assistance system, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has described FSD Supervised as Level 2 partial automation that requires a fully attentive driver. (tesla.com) (nhtsa.gov) Federal safety scrutiny is still active. NHTSA opened a 2025 preliminary evaluation into whether versions of FSD Supervised and FSD Beta executed maneuvers that could violate traffic-safety rules, and a 2026 defects document reviewed crashes involving Tesla’s vision-only system. (nhtsa.gov 1) (nhtsa.gov 2) Tesla has also kept expanding the robotaxi program while narrowing where it operates. Reuters reported on April 18, 2026 that Tesla expanded robotaxis to Dallas and Houston after the Austin launch, and Tesla’s site now lists those three Texas cities. (msn.com) (tesla.com) The result is two timelines running at once: Musk’s older deadlines for fully autonomous consumer cars, and Tesla’s current, more limited language around supervised driving and geofenced robotaxi service. The clips are landing now because Tesla’s own pages make that gap easy to measure. (tesla.com) (tesla.com)