Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told a conference that he believes his company will upgrade its vehicles to fully self-driving in 2023.

The London Evening Standard newspaper reports that he told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai that Tesla was “closer to it than we ever have been”.

“In terms of where Tesla is at this stage, I think we are very close to achieving full self-driving without human supervision,” the billionaire said. “This is only speculation, but I think we’ll achieve full self-driving, maybe what you would call four or five [levels of autonomy], I think later this year.”

Level Four is “high driving automation” where the driver still has to have the power to take control of the vehicle, while Level Five requires no human intervention and not even emergency manual intervention.

The report adds Tesla’s vehicles enrolled in the Full Self-Driving beta currently sit at level two, where they can steer, brake, and accelerate automatically with a qualified driver behind the wheel.

(Picture – Tesla)