Tesla continues to post videos of its vehicles driving autonomously, with an employee in the driver’s seat, as proof that it is making progress in autonomous driving.
However, there’s one thing that Tesla has never shared, and that’s actual data.
Over the last few months, Tesla has been consistently posting videos of its ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD) testing in various countries, as well as videos of owners testing FSD Supervised v13 in their own cars in North America.
When asked for proof of Tesla’s progress toward autonomous driving, CEO Elon Musk often points people to those videos, or he suggests trying Tesla’s FSD Supervised themselves.
However, this is anecdotal evidence at best. While it can be impressive, it’s not a reliable metric for tracking progress toward Tesla’s promise of unsupervised self-driving in customer vehicles.
At this point, anyone who has experienced Tesla’s latest versions of FSD is fully aware that the system is capable of doing these drives without intervention, which is all those videos prove. Not even the most prominent critics of Tesla’s approach to deploying autonomous driving technologies are denying that.
The real question is how reliably Tesla FSD can perform these drives over millions of miles without intervention.
Tesla has never released any data about that. Never. Not once.
The only data that Tesla releases are the overall mileage on FSD (left) and its quarterly Autopilot safety report (right):
The cumulative mileage is not particularly helpful for anything other than tracking the usage. Regarding the Autopilot safety report, it is marred by problems stemming from the self–reporting crashes and a road type bias, as Autopilot is primarily designed for use on highways.
Tesla also doesn’t differentiate between Autopilot and FSD in its safety report.
We want actual Tesla FSD Data
It’s not perfect, but the only valid metric that Tesla could share is its mileage between disengagements on FSD.
In September 2024, Tesla began releasing monthly AI/self-driving roadmap updates, referencing improvements in the number of miles between disengagements as an important metric to track progress.
Unsurprisingly, Tesla ceased releasing monthly updates after missing several key milestones just two months into starting the monthly updates.
The most telling part of Tesla’s monthly AI update is that it referenced specific improvements in miles between disengagements, for example, a ‘4x’ improvement, but it never shared Tesla’s base data or final miles between disengagements, just the multiple factors of improvement.
In short, Tesla claims to have 4.5 billion miles of FSD data, and it has never shared any. Yet, the monthly reports’ mentions of miles between disengagements prove that Tesla is tracking it. It’s just not sharing it.
Some people would see this as a red flag.
Crowdsource Tesla FSD data
Since Tesla doesn’t share any data, we have to rely on crowdsourced data from FSD users. There’s a dataset with hundreds of thousands of miles, which is a lot fewer than Tesla’s own data, but it is the best available.
Tesla fans and shareholders often dismiss this dataset. Still, Musk himself has publicly positively shared it on two occasions, which suggests that it is at least in the ballpark of the official data that Tesla closely guards.
The dataset currently has 40,000 miles on FSD v13.2.9, the latest FSD update on HW4 vehicles, and miles between critical disengagement currently stands at 342 miles:
Interestingly, the system has been regressing throughout the year.
If we take the average of all the other FSD v13.2 updates, which have over 50,000 miles of data, the system was averaging over 500 miles between critical disengagements throughout 2025:
This actually aligns with Tesla’s own Autopilot safety data, which also showed a regression in 2025.
Several other companies developing autonomous driving technologies have reported miles between disengagements in the tens of thousands of miles.
Ashok Elluswamy, the head of FSD at Tesla, has previously stated that for Tesla to enable unsupervised self-driving, Tesla needs to achieve the average in miles per critical intervention “equivalent of human miles between collision,” which stands at 700,000 miles, according to NHTSA.
Electrek’s Take
I think it’s essential to establish metrics to track progress in general. But on top of common sense, as someone who bought FSD and was promised it would become unsupervised self-driving, I think I’m owed a way to track progress beyond “just look at this anecdotal video evidence.”
After dozens of missed deadlines to deliver on what I bought, Tesla expects us to simply trust them.
I know that Tesla is concerned about the media and naysayers interpreting the data in a negative light, such as the regressions we are seeing, but that’s part of the game. Tesla itself admits that it’s a “two steps forward, one step back” kind of development.
They are trying to deploy a potentially life-saving technology, but it is also a potentially super dangerous technology. We need ways to track progress.
The lack of transparency is a red flag.
Tesla literally posted monthly reports for two months before giving up, and those reports didn’t even have valid trackable data.
Again, the videos are only impressive if you know nothing about FSD. I know that FSD can perform those drivers over a few miles, even over a few hundred miles, without intervention. No one is questioning that.
But it needs to do it consistently over hundreds of thousands of miles, and we can’t track progress toward that with these videos. Period.
Until then, it’s all vaporware.
This is coming from someone who bought FSD and believes that if Tesla were developing FSD without selling unsupervised self-driving to customers and using it to sell cars by claiming things like it turns Tesla’s vehicles into “appreciating assets”, it would be a celebrated product and Tesla would be seen as a leader in developing autonomous driving technologies solely on computer vision.
However, this is not the world we live in.
We live in a world where Tesla has been selling “Full Self-Driving” with the promise that it will become “unsupervised” for up to $15,000, and it has been claiming that it is on the verge of happening every year for the last six years.
Share the data or shut up about it.
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