Tesla just laid out its transportation mission: World domination

Elon Musk has said he thinks the world will switch over to autonomous driving tech.

He ramped up that prediction on Wednesday.

Andrew Harnik/Getty Images - Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images Elon Musk has repeatedly said cars will drive themselves around the world.

Now, he's making a bolder claim: Tesla will dominate that autonomy, he predicts.

The only thing that could get in the way, Musk says: these pesky governments! Tesla CEO Elon Musk famously thinks bots will drive us around.

On Wednesday, he took that long-running vision of autonomy a step further.

During the automaker's earnings call, Musk predicted that Tesla itself would dominate how passengers get around — so long as pesky regulators don't get in the way.

"I think Tesla will end up doing a majority of all passenger miles on Earth in any country where it is allowed to operate freely," he said.

"And you can come back and look at this prediction, but I feel confident about this prediction." He said Tesla's biggest hurdle to world domination is foreign governments blocking autonomous tech "to protect a domestic industry." That is a bolder statement than Musk's prior autonomy predictions.

During a January earnings call, he said the "vast majority of miles traveled" would eventually be autonomous and guessed that people would manually drive fewer than 5% of miles.

That prediction left other autonomous competitors — Waymo, Zoox, Ford, GM, Rivian, etc. — in the fray.

Vehicle autonomy is core to Tesla's valuation story.

The company says its future lineup will include only one vehicle that drivers can operate manually: the high-priced Roadster .

In September, the company started rolling out the steering-wheel-less Cybercab for ride-hailing in Texas.