Robot cars and people on Mars: Elon Musk’s future

SpaceX and Tesla Motors Inc. founder Elon Musk has never been shy about making bold predictions.

His latest pronouncements: that most cars won’t have drivers in three years and people will arrive on Mars by 2025, Bloomberg reports.

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. could start sending people off-planet by 2024 (they take months to get there), starting a 26-month cycle that will colonize the Red Planet and form the foundations of a space-faring civilization, the chief executive officer of both companies told Recode’s Code conference. As for fully autonomous vehicles, safety-prone regulators -- not technology -- are the hold-up, the billionaire PayPal co-founder said Wednesday.

“I consider autonomous driving to be basically a solved problem. There’s really only one area where it’s a little dodgy, and that’s where you’re at 30 to 40 miles per hour” in cities, he said. “We’re less than two years away from complete autonomy. Regulators however will take at least another year; they’ll want to see billions of miles of data.”