It sounds aggressive, but most of the hurdles at this point are regulatory and insurance related (at least during fair weather conditions). Uber is aiming to have autonomous cars within two years and Google is actively testing local autonomous commuter cars, so it seems feasible. Also note that current Tesla cars (assuming you are in the beta program) can drive themselves on highways today.

I mean fully autonomous, like let it drive to pick up the kids on its own. Not a really advanced cruise control / break if it sees an accident about to happen.

Uber's map system can't even correctly get me from my house to my work without leading the driver into an alley.

I think we'll get 95% of the way to autonomous, but I sort of doubt we'll have a car that you can, for example, sleep in while it's driving you around.

I hope I'm wrong. I'd love to buy one in 3-6 years.

I would think it's more or less highway driving.

As others have said, it's going to be more than three years before I trust it on a snowpacked highway, still less one with ice.

Car companies already travel all over the US to test varying parts of the vehicle, with individual teams ending up in places like death valley, alaska, or north carolina's tail of the dragon. Why would they not do the same for autonomous testing?

Sure, they would. But they've done most of the initial development on dry roads. Snow driving is rather a different beast, and has had less development and testing time (because the first step is to get it to work at all, in the best conditions).

Sure, they'll test it on snow. And I'll probably trust it on snow, eventually. But I'll trust it on snow later than I'll trust it on dry roads.

There are fully autonomous vehicles today! Driving right now in all probability. For Tesla to copy/buy/partner with them sounds totally reasonable to me.

He did say regulators would take another 1-3 years. So 4-6 before, you can "operate" an autonomous car.

There's a stream of autonomous cars driving around Mountain View pretty much constantly, and their number has been increasing quickly.

But those are Google cars. Why aren't we hearing reports of sightings of Tesla's self driving cars? If they are so close then by now there should have been many stories about them, just like there are about Google's cars. Instead all we have is Elon Musk talking about them.

Tesla will use Google autonomous-driving technology? Does Google really want to be manufacturing cars, or does it want to provide the software?

You can spot a Google self-driving Lexus by the big, spinning LIDAR on the roof. Teslas' somewhat-autonomous cars look like cars.