INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said on the company earnings call today that the company full self-driving mode, in a feature-complete release, could
arrive as early as the end of this year
That would be made available in an ‘early access& mode which is essentially a limited beta, and Musk qualified that this isn&t a sure
thing.
&While it going to be tight, it still does appear that will be at least in limited in early access release of a feature complete
self-driving feature this year,& he said on the call.
He added that it ¬ for sure,& but that it &appears to be on track& for a limited
private beta by year end.
This follows the release of Tesla Smart Summon automated parking lot driverless parking lot hailing feature
It allows Tesla owners to call their cars from their parking spots to pick them up from a curbside within the parking lot
The feature has been used plenty of times with mixed results reported from early use, but Musk also said that the company will be releasing
an updated version of the software with improvements in the next &week or so.&
The Smart Summon update is an improvement built on the data
taken from the &over a million& uses of the feature by Tesla owners already since its release at the end of September.
To make use of the
full self-driving mode that Tesla plans to introduce, vehicle owners will have to own the FSD upgrade package, which is a $7,000 upgrade
after it increased from $6,000 in August.
Tesla began shipping its new full self-driving computer hardware in all new vehicles beginning in
April, moving to its own custom chip
This was to ensure that enabling the FSD feature would be a software-only update, which is something the company had claimed would be
possible with a previous generation of self-driving computing hardware, but the challenge has clearly been more difficult than expected &
estimated timelines for the feature deployment have also slipped multiple times.
Musk added in response to a question later in the call that
while he thinks ‘early access& availability could be late this year, but full self-driving &reliable enough that you do not need to pay
attention, in our opinion& won&t be available until &the end of next year.&
To clarify what &feature-complete FSD& means in this context,
Musk later described multiple levels of Tesla assessment of self-driving tech, and specified that this meant cars are &able to be autonomous
but requiring supervision and intervention at times.&
