Elon Musk at TED

Elon Musk gave an interview today at TED. He ended the interview by asking, “You’ll tell me if it ever starts getting genuinely insane, right?”

The headline news, which isn’t really new news, is that Musk would like to build a new highway system, underground.

The man is nothing if not audacious.

On a more immediately feasible note, he also says, “November or December of this year, we [Tesla] should be able to go from a parking lot in California to a parking lot in New York, no controls touched at any point during the entire journey,”

That’s pretty awesome, although the catch with these things is how generalizable the solution is.

If the demonstration works only from one very specific parking lot in New York, to another very specific parking lot in California, and only over one precise cross-country route, that’s impressive but not groundbreaking. Delphi actually did something like that a few years ago.

If, on the other hand, Tesla builds a system that can drive over a wide variety of routes, that will be a huge step toward Level 5.