When I reviewed Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software in January, I hailed it as an “impressive” driver-assistance feature that left me wanting more.
I dreamed of being able to flip the autonomous driving system on whenever I make my routine 400-mile trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles — kick my feet up, listen to music, and ideally fall asleep without having to supervise the road.
That’s been part of Tesla’s ultimate pitch for the future. “With autonomy, you get your time back,” Elon Musk has said.
And the pitch may soon come true. Just don’t expect to make long self-driven road trips quite yet.
On Wednesday, during Tesla’s Q3 earnings call, Ashok Elluswamy, the company’s VP of AI, painted a more modest picture of what FSD unsupervised will look like for a personal car — at least at first.
Elluswamy said unsupervised FSD is coming “somewhere around Q2 next year” for privately owned Teslas, with the rollout of FSD V15.
The caveat is that it will only be operable in areas where Tesla already operates its Robotaxi service, which represents a small fraction of square miles for the total number of Teslas on US roads.
The Robotaxi platform is available in parts of seven metropolitan regions: Austin, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Orlando, Tampa, and the San Francisco Bay Area. In the Bay Area, all Tesla robotaxis are supervised by a human operator.
“The only additional requirement is to make sure that, for example, the customer Model Ys can be part of the geofences and the fleet management that Tesla has for it to be fully autonomous,” Elluswamy said.
In other words, your Tesla may be able to drive itself, but only if you’re within the zones where Tesla Robotaxi is operating. If you’re in Austin, that could cover about 260 square miles of the city, excluding high-speed roadways.
That’s similar to what other aspiring self-driving car companies have pitched.
Tensor, a San Jose-based automaker, aims to sell a luxury sedan that it says can drive itself. However, the self-driving feature will only operate within restricted geofences, the company told Business Insider.
Tesla didn’t say why it needs to limit the release of unsupervised FSD to geofences at first, although there are likely questions about liability that the company will have to address once it declares, Yes, our technology now lets you take your eyes off the road.
Autonomy is a difficult problem to solve after all. During the call, Elluswamy shut down the idea that competitors could catch up to Tesla’s FSD.
“When they get in the long tail of this problem — it’s so long that people don’t realize — anyone with a sane mind should not attempt to solve this problem,” he said. “It’s so difficult.”
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