Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company is poised to transform its electric cars into driverless vehicles by next year.

SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla expects to have full self-driving cars in which humans won’t have to touch the steering wheel around the second quarter of next year.

The company made the announcement during an investor conference at its Palo Alto, Calif., headquarters Monday, in which it outlined its bold but risky bid to transform Tesla’s electric cars into driverless vehicles.

CEO Elon Musk told investors that the company’s computer to enable its electric cars to become self-driving vehicles is powered by the best processing chip in the world.

Tesla had never made its own computer chip before it hired an ex-Apple engineer three years ago to design it.

Now, Musk boasts the chip is better than any other on the market “by a huge margin.”

Experts say they’re skeptical whether Tesla’s technology has advanced anywhere close to the point where its cars will be capable of being driven solely by a robot, without a human in position to take control if something goes awry.

“It’s all hype,” said Steven E. Shladover, a retired research engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who has been involved in efforts to create autonomous driving for 45 years.

“The technology does not exist to do what he is claiming. He doesn’t have it and neither does anybody else.”

More than 60 companies in the U.S. alone are developing autonomous vehicles. Some are aiming to have their fully autonomous cars begin carrying passengers in small geographic areas as early as this year.

Many experts don’t believe they’ll be in widespread use for a decade or more.

Musk’s description of Tesla’s controls as “Full Self-Driving” has alarmed some observers who think it will give owners a false sense of security and create potentially lethal situations in conditions that the autonomous cars can’t handle.

They also say they’re waiting for Musk to define self-driving and show just under what conditions and places the vehicles can travel without human intervention.

Some Tesla critics say Musk is making the full self-driving announcement to distract from poor earnings expected Wednesday.

Analysts polled by FactSet predict a $305.5 million first quarter net loss based on disappointing deliveries. Even bullish analysts expect bad news.