There are some people who may think of autonomous vehicles as the automotive equivalent of "the check is in the mail."
They always seem to be on the way, but they never seem to get here.
For years now, Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk has been promising the planet that Teslas will be driving themselves real soon and last year he renewed that oft-repeated conviction.
"I would be shocked if we do not achieve full-self-driving safer than a human this year. I would be shocked," Musk said during Tesla's fourth-quarter-earnings call last July.
And while some may scoff at Musk's claims, Ark Investment Management's chief executive Cathie Wood recently gave a resounding "hail, yes!' to the possibility of an autonomous Tesla taxi.
Wood made her comments during an interview with Fox Business host Charles Payne.
During a discussion about artificial intelligence, Wood said that companies that have proprietary data are probably going to be the biggest beneficiaries of AI.
Tesla is Ark Innovation EFT 's (ARKK) largest holding and Wood said that the electric vehicle maker was the best example of a company having proprietary AI data.
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Tesla in 'Pole Position' for Autonomous Taxis
"Tesla...has billions upon billions of miles of real-world driving data," she said, "with all kinds of corner cases showing Tesla where the problem spots are in autonomous driving or could be coming in autonomous driving."
"So, they have all of this proprietary data nobody else has it and we believe they're in the pole position to deliver an autonomous taxi platform in the next three to five years," Wood continued.
Tesla introduced Autopilot in 2015 with the aim of enabling vehicles to steer, accelerate and brake automatically. Full-Self Driving, or FSD, is more advanced than Autopilot and is intended for urban driving.
Wood praised Tesla and its autonomous potential last month, saying in a webinar cited by CNBC that "just from electric vehicles there could be almost a fivefold increase in this stock during the next five years.”
“And if you believe in autonomous cars at all, it’s closer to 13 times during the next five years," she said. "So, we are as bullish about Tesla as we have ever been.”
The company has been running into some potholes on the way to autonomy.
The U.S. Department of Justice has requested more information on Tesla's Autopilot and full-self driving feature.
"To our knowledge no government agency in any ongoing investigation has concluded that any wrongdoing occurred," the company wrote in the 10-K filing.
