Elon Musk: Tesla FSD Beta Button Going Out Next Friday

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A couple of years ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk talked about the Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) package soon becoming “feature complete” in customer cars — by the end of 2019 was the clear target. Well, there were some unforeseen hurdles along the way. Numerous Tesla owners who ponied up the extra charge for this software package (which costs $10,000 today and cost $6,000 when I bought it in August 2019) are now super eager to finally test out the nearly-self-driving capabilities. You might say that some of us have gotten a tad impatient even.

After huge code rewrites, a switch to a vision-only approach, and countless hours of beta testing by a few thousand lucky owners, it appears that Tesla is finally on the verge of rolling out feature-complete FSD access to a wide swath of North American Tesla owners. Maybe.

Before I go further, for anyone new to this story, let’s quickly roll through what “feature-complete FSD,” which is now basically just referred to as “FSD Beta,” means. Elon actually summarized it well in mid 2019:

“Feature complete means the car is able to drive from one’s house to work most likely without interventions. It will still be supervised, but it will be able to drive. It will fill in the gap from low-speed autonomy … you have low-speed autonomy with Summon, you’ve got high-speed autonomy on the highway, and you have intermediate-speed autonomy which really just means traffic lights and stop signs. Feature complete means it will likely be able to do that without intervention, without human intervention, but it will still be supervised.”

In other words, it is the car being able to drive itself from door to door — with human driver supervision and the driver taking over if the car is unable to do anything, or do it safely.

The running joke among Tesla fans closely following the developments on this is that Elon has said several times in the past 10 months or so that owners who bought the FSD package would probably get the ability to download feature-complete FSD within about 2 weeks. That is, his response to when we’d get it has often been “~2 weeks.” I’m not going to lie — I believed it would be ~2 weeks at least a few of these times. So, you might not want to use my judgement on this. However, I do think that we’re on the verge of a wide rollout.

This time around, it’s not ~2 weeks, but just one week. Also, it’s the version of the software that’s rolling out to the initial beta testers right now. This software is basically supposed to be ready for wide release at the moment, based on previous explanations, and the reason we have to wait another week is just for Tesla to clean up the bugs that appear after the initial rollout that is happening now. (Bugs appear with any major new release.)

The note above says we’ll get a “beta request button” with the update next week. That doesn’t mean we’ll immediately be able to download the software, though. Here’s what that means:

Anyway, that’s where we are. Countless Tesla owners who bought the Full Self-Driving suite may get access to the door-to-door FSD Beta software in a week. Or we may not. I’ll be sure to update you once I finally do!

Oh, as far as Europeans getting FSD Beta? Well, you’ve got to wait a bit longer.

By the way, Starlink is also coming out of beta soon.


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Zachary Shahan

Zach is tryin' to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director, chief editor, and CEO. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA], NIO [NIO], Xpeng [XPEV], Ford [F], ChargePoint [CHPT], Amazon [AMZN], Piedmont Lithium [PLL], Lithium Americas [LAC], Albemarle Corporation [ALB], Nouveau Monde Graphite [NMGRF], Talon Metals [TLOFF], Arclight Clean Transition Corp [ACTC], and Starbucks [SBUX]. But he does not offer (explicitly or implicitly) investment advice of any sort.

Zachary Shahan has 7317 posts and counting. See all posts by Zachary Shahan