Elon Musk: Driving Will Be Banned In The Future

(RTTNews) - Tesla Motors, Inc. (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has predicted that self-driving cars will become so much safer than human-driven cars that human driving might be banned in the future.

"It'll be an order of magnitude safer than a person. In fact, in the distant future, I think it's probably going to be... people may outlaw driving cars, because it's too dangerous. You can't have a person driving a two-ton death machine," Musk told Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) CEO Jen-Hsun Huang in an interview at the 2015 GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California.

"I think it's just going to become normal. Like an elevator. They used to have elevator operators, and then we developed some simple circuitry to have elevators just come to the floor that you're at, you just press the button. Nobody needs to operate the elevator. The car is just going to be like that," Musk said in the interview.

Musk also appreciated the size of the automotive industrial base. "There's two billion of them," he said. "So if tomorrow all cars were autonomous, it would take 20 years to replace the fleet, assuming the fleet stayed the same size."

Musk later took to Tweeter to clarify that he was not advocating against human-driven cars.

"To be clear, Tesla is strongly in favor of people being allowed to drive their cars and always will be. Hopefully, that is obvious," Musk tweeted.

"However, when self-driving cars become safer than human-driven cars, the public may outlaw the latter. Hopefully not," he added.

Musk has not released any further details about Thursday's conference on "range anxiety." He tweeted on Sunday that a new over-the-air software update to all Model S cars will end "range anxiety" - the stress and tension that electric car drivers feel when they fear that their vehicle does not have enough charge to reach its destination and they may not be near a charging station.

Tesla shares are currently trading at $195.89, up $1.16.