Tesla released its FSD beta software to customer cars in October 2020. Since then the small group of testers has been expanded until now when Elon Musk announced FSD Beta is available to everyone in North America who wants it.
This means those who purchased FSD or subscribe to FSD, can now opt into the beta and get it, there’s no safety score, it’ll just download to your car, and the car reboots and it has new capabilities.
While you can’t go to sleep in the car and are still legally responsible for the car, FSD Beta has the ability to navigate city streets, turn corners, deal with roundabouts and much more. FSD has come a long way in the past couple of years and Tesla has clearly reached the point where they believe the software powered largely by AI, rather than human-written code, is superior and safe enough to release to the public.
There’s currently no confirmed timeline for FSD Beta to expand further than North America and Canada to the rest of the world, despite many customers internationally having also paid for FSD.
Full Self Driving currently costs $15,000 to purchase outright, or US$199.00 per month.
Now with the availability restrictions removed, the goal for Tesla will be to increase adoption rates for FSD. With more than a million FSD-capable cars on the road in North America, Tesla has a large potential to derive serious revenue from this software.
In January this year, Musk suggested that a price rise would arrive when the Beta reached the wide-release status. That occurred today, so there’s a great chance the subscription price for FSD will increase now.
Let us know in the comments if you’d turn on beta if you have a Tesla.
