Tesla has constantly been reevaluating its Full Self-Driving program rollout, pegging back its initial expectations several times and reducing its very ambitious scope. Now the manufacturer says it has reached a major milestone since it has now made FSD Beta available to all Tesla owners in North America who paid for the option, whose price has increased twofold since 2019, now costing $15,000.
Elon Musk took to Twitter to make the announcement and said
Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen, assuming you have bought this option. Congrats to Tesla Autopilot/AI team on achieving a major milestone!
Before this announcement, Tesla only made FSD Beta available to drivers who had a specific safety score, which has a value between 0 and 100. Users have a safety score of 90 when they first log in to the Tesla app and this then varies depending on how the car rates their driving.
Initially, Tesla only allowed drivers with a perfect safety score of 100 to become a beta tester, then over time the minimum required rating has slowly gone down and now as per Elon Musk’s announcement, it is no longer a criteria for selection.
The most recent public version of FSD Beta is 10.69.3.1, and based on videos we’ve seen of people trying it out, it’s still not ready do come out of Beta. Perhaps the highly anticipated FSD Beta version 11 will bring more significant and visible improvements, which would bring a much needed image boost for FSD, which has now put Tesla under investigation in the US for false claims that resulted in people getting injured.
Tesla FSD is undeniably one of the most advanced Level 2 semi-autonomous driving systems in the world, but it clearly still needs a lot of work. In fact, according to several testers, the most recent FSD versions are actually a step back in many areas, so everybody is now looking to version 11 to hopefully change that image.
