Would you trust your car to drive you to work while you sleep?
Controversial Tesla boss Elon Musk hopes you do, because he’s pinning the future of his company on it. In a recent earnings call with investors, where Tesla reported its worst quarter in more than two years and only recorded a profit thanks to it selling emissions credits not cars, Musk laid out his vision for the future.
Musk’s presence on the call was an unusual move in itself, but it speaks to the seriousness of Tesla’s situation. Sales have been in decline due to a combination of a stagnant model range and Musk’s move into the polarising world of politics. He took up a position as ‘Special Government Advisor’ in Donald Trump’s administration and proceeded to cut thousands of public service jobs, which has made Musk a polarising figure not just in the USA but around the world.
Tesla cars and dealerships have been vandalised and buyers have seemingly been turned off by the political connotations for driving a Tesla in 2025. Not that Musk believes this is the cause of the sales decline, instead he blames the current economic climate as the major factor in Tesla’s drop in popularity.
“Tesla is not immune to the macro demand for cars,” Musk said on the call. “When there is economic uncertainty, people generally want to pause on doing a major capital purchase like a car. Absent macro issues we don’t see any reduction in demand.”
For his part, Musk is clearly aware that his government work has taken up a lot of his time and has declared he will scale back to reprioritise Tesla amid its current slump.
However, his vision for turning around the brand’s financial future is unorthodox. Despite Tesla desperately needing a new model to expand its range, Musk instead believes a combination of robots and self-driving car technology is the answer.
“The future for Tesla is better than ever,” Musk said. “The value of the company is delivering sustainable abundance with our affordable AI-powered robots. If you say, what’s the ideal future that you can imagine, that’s what you’d want. You’d want abundance for all in a way that’s sustainable, that’s good for the environment. Basically this is a happy future, this is the happiest future you can imagine.”
That ‘happy future’ may be a best-case-scenario, with Musk also claiming that there will be “millions” of fully self-driving Tesla models, including its new Robotaxi (which is currently only a concept) on the road by the second half of 2026.
“The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year,” he said.
This is not the first time Musk has spoken about the promise of full self-driving, though, it’s actually been his publicly stated goal for over a decade but has yet to become a reality. Musk began talking about full self-driving in 2015, claiming it would be possible “within three years” and has since repeatedly said it is coming within the next 12-18 months.
But Tesla has a history of not hitting its announced targets. Musk originally claimed that Robotaxi would be in production by 2020 and has been taking deposits on the second-generation Roadster since 2017, despite no public development of that car since that time.
Of course, even if Musk comes through on his claims, the next step in full self-driving is legislation and the legal challenges thrown up by the idea of having motorists sleeping while behind the wheel…
What do you think – Would you trust a car to drive you while you sleep?
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