Tesla owners have driven 1 billion miles with Autopilot activated

Tesla’s global fleet recently reached half a million vehicles, and all of them added over the past three years have been equipped with Autopilot hardware, which has been gathering data for Tesla’s driver assist program.

The automaker now says that the Tesla owners have driven 1 billion miles with Autopilot activated as of today.

Tesla says that it represents “10% of the total mileage driven by Tesla vehicles to date”, but it doesn’t mean that current Tesla drivers use Autopilot for 1 in 10 miles.

It’s 10% of all the mileage of Tesla’s fleet, including vehicles that were not equipped with Autopilot hardware and those that have the hardware, but the owners didn’t buy Autopilot.

As we reported earlier this month, Tesla recently reached 10 billion electric miles with a global fleet of half a million cars.

Now we’ve learned that 1 billion of those miles have been driven with the help of Autopilot.

CEO Elon Musk has previously mentioned the milestone as the minimum they would need to move Autosteer from ‘beta’ to a regular feature.

While the fleet has driven 1 billion miles with Autopilot activated, Tesla has also been using its Autopilot system to gather data from many more billions of miles.

The Autopilot system can still gather data about its environment and potential Autopilot behavior in order to feed Tesla’s neural net, even without being activated.

That data gathering method is often referred to as “shadow mode” because the autonomous driving system runs in the background of the vehicle without being able to have any input on the driving.

As we previously reported, Tesla’s fleet now adds over 20 million miles per day on average and most of those miles are from vehicles equipped with Tesla’s Autopilot system.

But when it comes to miles driven with Autopilot activated, it now stands at 1 billion.

The most recent rate per day is unknown and it is apparently not really stable. Tesla said that it can detect dips in Autopilot usage by its fleet when there’s negative media coverage, which has been quite common over the last year.

Nonetheless, the data is going to be useful for the continuous development of the system, which Musk said could lead to full autonomy as soon as the end of next year.