Tesla plans to double-down on its autonomous driving efforts, even as the company continues to deal with the fallout from the fatal crash allegedly involving the tech in Texas this month. 

A Tesla owner and another occupant were said to be testing the autonomous capabilities of the car when it struck a tree at high speed and caught fire, killing both occupants. Tesla has said that particular car did not have high-level autonomous capabilities and they could not have been engaged anyway, as the road was unsuitable, Kallanish notes.

Questions still surround the timeline of the crash - particularly whether a driver was in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash and why the owner of the Tesla was found in the back seat with the driver’s seat belt unbuckled.

“Through further investigation of the vehicle and the accident remains, we...were able to find that the steering wheel was indeed deformed, so it was leading to a likelihood that someone was in the driver’s seat at the time of the crash and all seat belts post-crash were found to be unbuckled,” says Lars Moravy, vice president of vehicle engineering. “We were unable to recover the data from the SD card at the time of impact, but the local authorities are working on doing that and we await their report.”

There’s no question, however, that autonomous driving is a big part of Tesla’s future, says frontman Elon Musk. 

“A lot of people think Tesla is a car company or perhaps an energy company. I think long-term people will think of Tesla as much as an AI robotics company as we are a car company or an energy company,” says Musk. “I think we are developing one of the strongest hardware and software AI teams in the world and so we appear to be able to do things with self-driving that others cannot.”

A massive data set and accompanying processing capabilities appears to be the limiting factor for autonomous autos, Musk says. 

“So we couldn’t find a powerful enough neural net computer, so we designed and built our own. The software out there was really quite primitive for this task, and so we built a team from scratch and have been developing what we think is probably the most advanced real-world AI in the world,” Musk says. “And then it sort of makes sense that this is kind of what needs to happen because the road system is designed for a neural net computer, our brain. Our brain is a neural net computer. And the entire system is designed for vision with a neural net computer, which is because it’s designed for eyes and a brain.”

The contest between man and machine - in the driver’s seat, at least - is no contest at all, he says. 

“It never gets tired. It’s never texting. It has redundancy, and its reaction time is super-human. Then it seems pretty obvious that such a system would achieve an extremely high level of safety, far in excess of the average person. So that’s what we are doing.”

Tesla recorded a record profit in the first quarter of $438 million - up from just $16m in Q1 2020.