Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta is now available to all owners who ordered the Full Self-Driving package in North America. It’s no longer limited to drivers with a high safety score.
FSD Beta enables Tesla vehicles to drive autonomously to a destination entered in the car’s navigation system, but the driver needs to remain vigilant and ready to take control at all times.
Since the responsibility rests with the driver and not Tesla’s system, it is still considered a level-two driver-assist system, despite its name. It has been sort of a “two steps forward, one step back” type of program, as some updates have seen regressions in terms of the driving capabilities.
Tesla has frequently been releasing new software updates to the FSD Beta program to improve performance with the goal of becoming safer than human drivers and adding more owners to it.
For the last six months are so, there have been over 100,000 Tesla owners in the program, but CEO Elon Musk said that FSD Beta would be available to every owner who bought FSD Beta in North America by the end of the year.
Today, Musk announced on Twitter that FSD Beta is now available to anyone in North America:
Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen, assuming you have bought this option. Congrats to Tesla Autopilot/AI team on achieving a major milestone!
As we previously reported, the wider release is part of the FSD Beta v11 update, which merges Tesla’s FSD software stack (city driving) with Autopilot’s (highway driving). Tesla is slowly widening the release of this version until all owners with FSD receive it.
Electrek’s Take
I wouldn’t call that a “major milestone” considering the goal it is replacing. It used to be “1 million robotaxis by the end of the year.”
Top comment by Pmurphyjam
I’ve had FSD for a year now, it’s been getting better with every release. I test it when we drive to a restaurant for dinner and with the last 2 versions it’s made it to the destination with no interventions more than a few times. Granted it’s usually less than 8 miles, but it does go through lots of city streets and traffic lights along with left hand turns and right hand turns. For right hand turns I see it merge into oncoming traffic when it see’s a gap, before it would just wait for no traffic on prior versions. I do question the route it takes though, sometimes down residential streets which I would never take. My wife still doesn’t trust it and doesn’t use it on city streets just the highway, but I have a growing confidence in it. Hoping they improve the summon and still waiting for the drop off and park. On summon I’ve seen it drive around an entire parking lot when just a simple U turn reverse would head it in the right direction.
Then it was “1 million people with FSD Beta by the end of the year.”
Now it’s just “everyone who paid up to $15,000 for the Full Self-Driving Package gets access to a beta version of the program that doesn’t deliver on the promised performance.” And that’s likely nowhere near 1 million people based on what we are hearing about the FSD take rate.
I would hardly call that a major milestone. I don’t even know if Tesla is doubling the number of people in the beta program with this move. Either way, I don’t see a clearer path to actually achieving self-driving with this “major milestone.”
What do you think? Let us know in the comments section?
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