Carlos Ghosn, the chairman and chief executive of the Renault-Nissan Alliance, announced during a news media event on Jan. 7 at the company’s research laboratory in Silicon Valley that Nissan would introduce 10 new autonomous vehicles in the next four years.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, upped the ante. In a conference call with reporters last week, he asserted that the so-called Autopilot feature introduced in the Tesla Model S last fall was “probably better than a person right now.”
Mr. Musk also said that within a year or two, it would be technically feasible to summon a Tesla from the opposite side of the country.
But there is a growing gap between what these executives are saying and what most people think of when they hear executives or scientists describing autonomous or driverless cars.
What Mr. Musk and Mr. Ghosn are describing — cross-country-driving hyperbole aside — are cars with advanced capabilities that can help drive or even take over in tricky situations like parallel parking on a busy street.
Truly autonomous cars that do all the work, like the bubble-shaped vehicles Google has been testing near its Silicon Valley campus, are still at least a decade away from ferrying people around town, said Xavier Mosquet, a senior partner at the Boston Consulting Group and managing director of the firm’s Detroit office.
“This is going to be a journey, and a reasonably long one,” he said.
It is increasingly a journey with significant financial implications. Last year, Uber announced plans to open an autonomous vehicle research center with Carnegie Mellon University. General Motors recently invested $500 million in Uber’s top competitor, Lyft, with the goal of creating an on-demand network of autonomous vehicles. And rumors continue that Google and Ford are entering into a partnership to build autonomous cars.