Tesla CEO Elon Musk has long believed that robots will be responsible for transporting us to and from our destinations.

On Wednesday, he took another step forward in realizing his long-held vision of autonomous driving. During the car manufacturer's earnings call, Musk predicted that Tesla itself would be in charge of how passengers travel—provided that those annoying regulatory agencies don't get in the way.

He said, "I believe that in any country that allows Tesla to operate freely, it will ultimately account for the vast majority of passenger miles on Earth. I could ask you to come back in time to see this prediction, but I am very confident in it."

He stated that the biggest obstacle for Tesla to achieve “world dominance” is foreign governments preventing autonomous driving technology in order to “protect local industries.”

This is more bold than Musk's previous predictions regarding autonomous driving.

At a financial report conference in January of this year, he stated that "the vast majority of driving mileage" would ultimately be completed by autonomous driving, and speculated that the mileage driven manually by people would be less than 5%. At that time, this prediction still allowed other autonomous driving competitors—Waymo, Zoox, Ford, General Motors, Rivian, etc.—to continue competing.

Vehicle autonomous driving capability is at the core of Tesla's valuation narrative. The company stated that its future product line will only include one model that allows for manual operation by the driver:

In September, Tesla began to launch a model in Texas that comes without a steering wheel, Cybercab, for use in ride-hailing services.

The launch process was not smooth. Although Tesla stated that it was increasing production and preparing to launch the Cybercab ride-hailing service in Florida, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) initiated a review just hours after the car was publicly announced, investigating the automaker's self-certification.

Elon Musk has described his predictions as "the best guesses," but several of his recent forecasts regarding Tesla's autonomous driving timeline have not come true. This includes his prediction that unsupervised autonomous driving would begin to expand across the United States by 2025.

Today, Tesla has set a new target date for the launch of its fully autonomous driving software for consumers. On Wednesday, the company's Vice President of Artificial Intelligence, Ashok Elluswamy, stated that unsupervised FSD will be launched "around the second quarter of next year."

Tesla did not immediately respond to the request for a comment from Business Insider.