Elon Musk says making autonomous cars is much harder than he expected, after Tesla's timeline for the latest 'full self-driving' software slipped again

• Elon Musk said he didn't expect making a self-driving Tesla to be so difficult.
• Musk said Tesla's latest full self-driving (FSD) software would arrive "soon," after the timeline slipped again.
• "Didn't expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect," Musk tweeted on Saturday.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on Saturday that making a self-driving car was harder than he expected, after the company's timeline for its latest Full Self-Driving (FSD) software slipped again.

Self-driving was a "hard problem" that "requires solving a large part of real-world AI," Musk tweeted.

"Didn't expect it to be so hard, but the difficulty is obvious in retrospect," he said.

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He also said that the latest version of Tesla's FSD beta software would be shipped soon. "I swear!" he added.

FSD, which doesn't make a Tesla car fully autonomous, currently costs a one-off $10,000, and was released in beta to some Tesla owners in October. It has all the features of Tesla's Autopilot - which brakes, accelerates, and steers automatically - plus it allows cars to change lanes, park themselves, and recognize stop signs and traffic lights.

-Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 3, 2021

In July 2018, Musk said that Version 9 of FSD would be released in August of that year. He then said in 2019 that there would be "over a million cars with full self-driving" within a year, per The Verge.

The billionaire's latest timeline update for the FSD Version 9 release came in April, when he tweeted that he'd be surprised if the software arrived later than June.