Musk Gives Us More Reasons to Believe the Model 3 Will Be Fully Autonomous

The CEO of Tesla is obviously very excited about what his company is doing. Maybe "obviously" is a bit of an overstatement, as Elon Musk isn't exactly the most extroverted person, but you can sense the pleasure he takes from speaking about his work from other clues.

And why wouldn't he be proud? In just a few years, he managed to make a company the best at something, and the amount of effort can be seen in the dark circles under his eyes, but he made no secret of the fact he's a bit of a workaholic, so he'd probably had those even if he worked as a janitor because that wouldn't have been his only job. Besides, when you go to bed in a sleeping bag at the end of the Model X assembly line, you probably don't get a very good night's sleep.

Pretty soon, though, he might have to move that makeshift bed on the Model 3 line, as the smaller sedan is getting closer and closer to the start of its production. If everything goes to plan, only 13 months should pass until the first Model 3 will come off the line. Until then, though, Musk promised us another important event.

Back in March during the first preview of the new Model, Musk told everybody there that the event they were attending was only "phase one." Asked about the barren interior of the prototypes present at the event, he said that "phase two" would clear everything up. This led a lot of people to conclude that the Model 3 will be autonomous-ready, meaning that it will have all the hardware and the software necessary for a car that can drive completely by itself, only restricted by its software until the legislation could catch up.

During the Code Conference yesterday, Musk made one more step towards confirming this suspicion by saying that there will be another big event for the Model 3 before the end of the year and that they'll do "the obvious thing." Oh, and this came as part of an answer to an Autopilot-related question. Our guess is that Tesla will show off a completely autonomous Model 3 that will have its features neutered until the laws will allow it to use them in their entirety. It will just a show of force, letting everybody know that they've got it and putting the pressure on the competition. Which, if you ask us, was already there anywhere.