Tesla CEO Elon Musk held a conference call today to discuss the company’s third quarter financial results with analysts. During the call, Musk commented on the recent release of the Autopilot and the technology going forward. When asked how he sees the market with full autonomous driving and manual driving vehicles, the CEO said that once self-driving cars are being produced, non-autonomous cars will have a “negative value” and be the equivalent of owning a horse – meaning it would be for “sentimental reasons”. Musk’s vision could happen sooner than most people think. Earlier this week, we reported on one of Tesla’s main supplier for the Autopilot hinting at a new hardware suite available as soon as this year that could possibly allow Tesla’s cars to go fully autonomous.

Musk’s full quote from the call:

I’m on the record saying that I think all cars will go fully autonomous in the long-term. I think it will be quite unusual to see cars that don’t have full autonomy – let say for new car production in the 15 to 20 years timeframe… and for Tesla it will be a lot sooner than that. I actually think at the point which cars are being made that have full autonomy, any cars that are being made that don’t have full autonomy will have negative value. It will be like owning a horse. You are really owning it for sentimental reasons.

Tesla’s CEO previously mentioned that the company is aiming for a fully self-driving technology within 3 years.

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