Elon Musk has again updated the timeline for Tesla releasing its highly anticipated Full Self-Driving Beta v9 software update and FSD Subscription.
Here’s the long history of Tesla’s FSD v9 and FSD Subscription timelines:
Tesla Full Self-Driving beta
Tesla is currently testing the “feature complete” version of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package in beta with a few thousand customers and employees through its early access program.
It’s not considered autonomous driving yet because the driver is still responsible for the vehicle and needs to be ready to take control at all times, but Tesla’s system performs all the other driving tasks autonomously, including driving through intersections.
Tesla hopes that it can keep improving on the system with customer feedback until it can gather enough data to show that it’s safer than human driving.
Over the last few months, CEO Elon Musk has been talking about Tesla moving to a new generation (v9) of its FSD software that will remove reliance on radar readings and instead have everything done through computer vision based on cameras.
The update has been pushed a few times.
Most recently, Musk said that it should be coming “no later than June.”
Earlier this month, the CEO did say that Tesla would release a “first step” toward that update first.
Now we learned yesterday that it was moving all North American Model 3 and Model Y vehicles to a camera-only computer vision system, but one that has more limitations than the current system.
While commenting on this update, Musk now says that Tesla FSD v9, the update that should actually improve capacity, is coming in about three weeks:
“Pure vision Autopilot is now rolling out in North America. There will be an update of this production release in 2 weeks, then FSD beta V9.0 (also pure vision) a week later.”
This should now put Tesla’s FSD v9 software update in mid-June.
Again, this is the software update that Musk has been hyping up as “mind-blowing” and an important step toward Tesla achieving true full self-driving capabilities.
Tesla FSD Subscription
Last year, we reported on indications that Tesla is working on a pay-as-you-go subscription for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package.
Later, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla planned to release such an option “toward the end of 2020.”
That never happened, and the release was later pushed by the CEO to “early 2021.”
In March, Musk said that it will “for sure” happen during the second quarter of 2021.
Last month, the CEO said that the subscription is a “sure thing” for May.
A month later and few weeks into May, it doesn’t look quite a sure thing with the CEO saying that it will come in “about a month”:
“Subscription rolls out in about a month”
With the latest update to the FSD Beta v9 timeline, Musk said that FSD Subscription should be coming around the same time:
“FSD subscription will be enabled around the same time.”
That would also make the Subscription option available in mid-June.
The FSD Subscription is expected to give access to the FSD features to a lot more people, since it’s going to be an alternative to paying $10,000 for the FSD package, which is currently the only option.
But it will not be a cheap monthly fee.
Tesla has made it clear that outright buying the package is going to better financially, which means that the monthly cost of the subscription is likely going to be over $100 per month.
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