Electric vehicle giant Tesla reported another significant milestone in its Full Self-Driving (FSD) efforts. According to the Q1 2024 Update Letter, the FSD successfully topped 1.3 billion cumulative miles.
Achieving 1.3B cumulative miles milestone
Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) users have officially exceeded 1.3 billion cumulative miles in the first quarter of 2024.
Impressively, this new achievement occurred just nearly three weeks after Tesla announced the 1 billion cumulative miles milestone in X.
The rapid growth of FSD’s user pool is unsurprising, considering how Tesla has been striving to make it more accessible to all owners. For instance, it recently reduced the software’s monthly subscription fee from $199 to $99.
Moreover, Tesla launched a month of free FSD trial for eligible models. Chief Executive Elon Musk also instructed its delivery centers to offer a test drive to customers as part of the delivery process.
These efforts increased FSD’s cumulative miles substantially, especially after the FSD (Supervised) v12 launched.
“(FSD’s) been pushed out to, I think, around 1.8 million vehicles, and we’re seeing about half of people use it so far and that percentage is increasing with each passing week.
So, we now have over 300 million miles that have been driven with FSD V12 since the launch of Supervised Full Self-Driving. It’s become very clear that the vision-based approach with end-to-end neural networks is the right solution for scalable autonomy.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk
Tesla’s vision-based strategy
Tesla shared in the latest Update Letter that it is becoming increasingly apparent that employing a “vision-based” method will be the key to achieving full autonomy.
For context, this approach utilizes cameras and artificial intelligence to make the FSD (Supervised) function better than competitors’ lidar-based systems. It needs neural network training to power the vision system through an enormous amount of real-world data from Tesla’s fleet.
Tesla contends that the vision-based approach is more scalable as it does not require pre-mapped data for all locations, enabling its equipped EVs to function anywhere with cameras.
FSD’s rapid expansion
The FSD software’s user pool continues to expand owing to Tesla’s significant efforts to promote it among its owners.
Tesla apparently took approximately 3.5 years to hit 1 billion cumulative miles in FSD. Remarkably, it managed to add another 300 million+ miles in just a few weeks.
Therefore, it would no longer be surprising if the FSD hits the 2 billion threshold in the next few months.
It is also worth noting that CEO Musk recently disclosed that Tesla is currently in talks with a “major automaker” about licensing the FSD.
Despite the lower-than-expected sales and revenue drop, its shares still rose 13.33% in after-hours trading on Wednesday.
