Tesla CEO Elon Musk outlines the planned rollout for FSD
The beta is out in the wild now on a limited scale, but it could be rolled out to a lot more people soon.
Tesla's Elon Musk wants to get the Full Self-Driving beta out to more people, and fast.
So, the Tesla earnings call is done, and unlike previous calls where CEO Elon Musk went on wild tangents or railed against government decrees, this call was pretty subdued. We did learn a couple of interesting things about Tesla's planned rollout of the Full Self-Driving system it's been at work on for years.
First, the initial beta release has begun. Musk stated that this went out to a very small group of people but that the number of people using the beta will likely go up as early as this weekend and increase rapidly from there. He posited that it could be released network-wide by the end of the year.
That widespread availability raises some concerns for us, specifically because Tesla seemingly hasn't done a great deal of dedicated on-the-road testing. Instead, it's been relying on data collected by its customers' vehicles to run simulations to better train a neural network. This seems like a faster, cheaper way to develop a self-driving vehicle system, but it doesn't necessarily seem like the safest or most responsible. This is definitely not a case where the old Silicon Valley saw "Move fast and break things" should apply.
Next, we learned that the goal for FSD is to have a vehicle be able to drive itself in areas even without any kind of data connection and without having been there before, or without any Tesla at all having been there. It's not clear what the exact timeline is to get to this functionality level, but being able to operate autonomously without a data connection would open up a lot of exciting possibilities.
The rest was more talk about how all vehicle transportation will be autonomous and how the Tesla robotaxi fleet will significantly change the value proposition for owning a Tesla, etc. -- aka stuff we've already heard from Musk in the past.
If you're a Tesla owner and you have access to the Full Self-Driving beta, let us know in the comments.
