In a document released prior to its earnings call on Tuesday, Tesla announced a significant expansion of its Full Self-Driving Beta program.
The company revealed that 400,000 Tesla owners in the United States and Canada now have access to the FSD Beta feature, a significant increase from the 160,000 reported in September 2021.
“We have now released FSD Beta to nearly all customers in the US and Canada who bought FSD (approximately 400,000). This is an important milestone for our company. Every customer in the US and Canada can now access FSD Beta functionality upon purchase/subscription and start experiencing the evolution of AI-powered autonomy.”
It is worth noting that the current 400,000 users of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta program are limited to the United States and Canada. This is despite the fact that CEO Elon Musk had previously announced that the program would be available worldwide by the end of 2022. Despite this limitation, the user base of the FSD Beta program has seen a significant increase of 250% in just four months. This is despite the fact that the option to purchase the FSD Beta outright costs $15,000 in the US. However, Tesla also offers it as a monthly subscription for compatible vehicles at $99 for those with Enhanced Autopilot, and $199 for those without.
During the Q4 2022 earnings call, Musk noted that the take rate for the FSD Beta program is improving, and that there is a strong trend among Tesla owners towards using the FSD Beta option. He stated that “with each incremental improvement, the enthusiasm matches the increases.” The expansion in the number of users has also contributed significant amounts of data to Tesla’s neural network, with the FSD Beta fleet contributing over 90 million miles of data to the company’s neural network as of December 2022.
During the call, Musk also noted that the total miles driven with FSD Beta outside of highways reached 100 million miles, and emphasized that the FSD Beta program is safe. He stated that “we would not have released FSD Beta if these statistics were not accurate.” Tesla also included two graphs in its Q4 2022 Shareholder Deck, showing the exponential growth of the cumulative miles driven with FSD Beta and the miles driven per accident. The second graph clearly shows that Tesla vehicles using Autopilot technology cover more than three times as long distances as Tesla vehicles not using Autopilot per each reported accident, and in both cases, the number of miles driven per accident is much higher than the US average, according to Tesla.
