Elon Musk says that Tesla's "early access" full self-drive may arrive by the end of the year – TechCrunch
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on today's revenue call that the company's full self-service mode, in full release of the function, could arrive as soon as the end of this year. This will be made available in an "early access" mode which is really a limited beta, and Musk qualified that this is not a secure thing.
"Although it will be cramped, it still seems that it will be at least limited in the early release of a feature fully self-driving feature this year," he said on the call.
He added that it is "not safe" but that it "seems to be on track" for a limited private beta at year-end.
This follows the release of Tesla's Smart Summon automated parking space for driverless parking. It allows Tesla owners to call their cars from their parking lots to retrieve them from a frontage in the parking lot. The feature has been used many times with mixed results reported from early use, but Musk also said the company will release an updated version of the software with improvements over the next "week or so."
The Smart Summon update is an improvement based on the data obtained from the "over a million" use of the feature by Tesla owners since its launch in late September.
To take advantage of the full self-driving mode that Tesla plans to introduce, vehicle owners must own the FSD upgrade package, which is a $ 7,000 upgrade after increasing from $ 6,000 in August.
Tesla began shipping its new full, self-propelled computer hardware in all new vehicles from April to move its own custom chip. This was to ensure that activation of the FSD feature would be a software update, which the company had claimed would be possible with an earlier generation of self-running computer hardware, but the challenge has clearly been more difficult than expected ̵[ads1]1; estimated timelines for the distribution of the feature have also worn several times.
Musk added in response to a question later in the conversation that while he believes the availability of "early access" may be late this year, but full self-driving "reliable enough that you don't need to pay attention, in our opinion" not available until "the end of next year."
To clarify what "functional FSD" means in this context, Musk later described several levels of Tesla's assessment of self-driving technologies, specifying that this meant that cars "are capable of" to be autonomous, but requires supervision and intervention at times. "
