Big tech billionaire Elon Musk said during a Monday interview that manual driving will soon be a thing of the past as self-driving vehicles continue to rise in popularity.
Musk joined the Samson International Smart Mobility Summit in Israel via video and stayed up until 2 a.m. local time to answer questions about the future of technology.
He addressed Tesla’s robotaxi rollout and said the company is making “steady progress” on self-driving software that aims to mimic how humans drive.
Musk said he hopes to achieve this through “AI and cameras” paired with a “digital neural net.”
“Like 10 years from now, probably 90 percent of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self-driving car,” he predicted.
“So overwhelmingly, it’ll be quite a niche thing in 10 years to actually be driving your own car, because the car will drive you,” he continued.
Elon Musk in new interview: “10 years from now, probably 90% of all distance driven will be driven by the AI in a self-driving car. It will be quite a niche thing in 10 years to actually be driving your own car.”
AI already drives for 90%+ of the miles I travel. https://t.co/6uwiDKS9of pic.twitter.com/PNktWdbPPO
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 18, 2026
Musk also predicted that this new system would be safer than human driving, adding, “It is quite magical because the car feels like it is sentient. It actually feels like it’s alive. And you can actually, as we improve the software, you can feel the sentience growing in the car.”
He said these self-driving automobiles are mostly operational in a few Texas cities, but he expects them to be rolled out nationwide by the end of this year.
“The world’s going to have a lot of robots in the future,” Musk declared. “And what Tesla makes is effectively four-wheeled robots right now. And in the future, we’ll also be having humanoid robots. You’re seeing a lot of startups with humanoid robots, and my prediction is that there will be far more… intelligent robots in the world than there will be people.”
He believes this evolution will be a positive for humanity, but also recommended caution.
“I think this is most likely to be a good thing,” Musk stated. “We always want to be a little paranoid, or certainly not complacent, about the safety of robots. But I think it will usher in an age of — not universal basic income — but universal high income.”
These comments came shortly before a federal jury in Oakland, California, went against Musk in a case he brought against OpenAI, where he alleged the company’s leadership “stole a charity” when they changed it to a for-profit framework.
Musk, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015, sought the removal of Sam Altman as CEO and company president Greg Brockman from their leadership roles.
The SpaceX founder also wanted an “unwinding of the company’s recent conversion to a more traditional governance structure and damages worth more than $180 billion to be paid into an OpenAI foundation.”
The jury ultimately found all of Musk’s claims fell outside the statute of limitations.
Musk left OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT, in 2018 when he was unable to persuade leadership to merge with Tesla.
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