Tesla currently has 160,000 customers who are voluntarily testing the Level 2 Full Self-Driving (FSD) driver assistance system. They are customers who have paid thousands of dollars for a feature that is not yet openly available, only for drivers with the best safety record in the United States and Canada.
During Tesla’s AI Day yesterday, Elon Musk commented that the invite-only beta should be ready for global rollout by the end of the year. Not only that, a big update is expected during October, without going into more details. If it is done as in the United States, the drivers with the highest scores will have a place first.
In certain countries, the deployment of FSD will be conditional on the authorities giving the go-ahead, and since that is mainly for Europe, it may be that we have to wait a little longer. At a legal level, the Tesla FSD system is a driving aid, since the person behind the wheel cannot lose sight of the windshield at any time.
It is still a system that is still far from being complete. Tesla’s goal is that the FSD allows fully autonomous driving (no more and no less, is what it promises) from point A to point B, with the driver being able to dedicate himself to any task he deems necessary in the meantime. At the moment, this is not legal in Europe, level 3 SAE approvals have hardly been granted and in a limited way.
Of course, the growth of drivers evaluating the FSD system will increase considerably. In North America alone it has gone from 2,000 to 160,000 beta participants in the space of a year. In a few months, it could reach a million. This will improve the accuracy of the neural network, although there remains a bottleneck in the form of human developers having to analyze what has gone wrong each time a driver is forced to take the wheel.
