During Tesla's latest earnings call on Wednesday, the company's billionaire boss, Elon Musk, outlined what he called "the obvious" future for the car industry.
One day individuals will share electric, self-driving vehicles, says Musk.
"The way things are obviously rolling towards is a shared electrical autonomy model," Musk says on the conference call.
People will "share their cars and be able to offer their cars as effectively — kind of a robo-Lyft or robo-Uber, sort of like a combination of Uber, Lyft and Airbnb type of thing," Musk says.
Then, Musk says, autonomous car owners will be able to rent out their cars to other users based on their needs and level of comfort.
"You can own your car and have 100 percent usage of an autonomous electric car. You can say it's available generally to anyone who wants to use it when you're not using it, you can recall it at will, you can restrict usage to only friends and family, or only users who are five-star," says Musk.
"This is like the obvious thing that's going to happen," the Tesla CEO says.
For all this to come to fruition, cars need to have "full autonomy, level four or five, whatever you want to call it," says Musk on the call.
A level four vehicle is "capable of performing all driving functions under certain conditions" and a five, the highest level of automation, means a vehicle is "capable of performing all driving functions under all conditions," according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In both cases, "driver may have the option to control the vehicle."
There also need to be a lot of fully autonomous cars on the road and a "software infrastructure" for cars and drivers to communicate, says Musk.
The Tesla CEO was hard pressed to give a time frame for when this vision would become a reality, because he doesn't know when the industry will get the necessary regulatory approval for an autonomous future.
"The thing that's tricky with autonomous vehicles is that autonomy doesn't reduce the accident rate or fatality rate to zero. It improves it substantially," says Musk, but the accidents that do happen with autonomous vehicles get a disproportionate amount of attention, in his view.
"If it's an autonomous situation, it's headline news, and the media fails to mention that actually they shouldn't really be writing the story, they should be writing the story about how autonomous cars are really safe. But that's not the story that people want to click on," says Musk.
Regulators respond to public sentiment and that slows the approval process, according to Musk.
"So, if the press is hounding the regulators, and the public is laboring on misapprehension that autonomy is less safe because of misleading press, then this is where I find the challenge of predicting it to be very difficult."
In addition to criticizing the press, Musk called a question from a financial analyst "boring" and he took significant time to answer questions from a 25-year-old YouTuber. Morgan Stanley financial analyst Adam Jonas called it "arguably the most unusual [earnings] call I have experienced in 20 years."
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