While a lot of the attention surrounding AI Day 2022 was on Optimus, Tesla’s humanoid robot, the electric vehicle maker also discussed one of its most ambitious endeavors during the event — the Full Self-Driving Beta. And as per Musk’s estimates, FSD Beta should be ready to expand to more territories by the end of the year.
The FSD Beta fleet has grown significantly, and during AI Day 2022, Tesla revealed that it now has about 160,000 customers in the program. This is an impressive number, especially considering that other autonomous driving companies like industry leader Waymo are estimated to operate less than a thousand cars today.
Elon Musk, for his part, noted during AI Day 2022 that from a technical standpoint, FSD Beta should be ready for a worldwide rollout by the end of the year. The CEO noted, however, that for a lot of countries, rolling out such a program would likely require regulatory approval. Such approvals could very well delay FSD Beta’s release in some countries.
It should be noted that Musk specifically mentioned a worldwide rollout of the FSD Beta program by the end of 2022. The CEO did not state that the Full Self-Driving suite and all its advanced features such as inner-city driving would be rolling out globally. Musk simply announced that Tesla would be expanding its pool of FSD Beta testers to electric vehicle owners across the world by year’s end.
With that in mind, Tesla owners should probably set their expectations with regards to the performance and capabilities of FSD Beta. Inasmuch as the system is impressive in the way that it can navigate through inner-city streets, after all, it still has a lot of areas where it needs to improve. With real-world driving data from across the globe, however, Tesla would likely end up improving FSD Beta at a pace much faster than before.
Watch Tesla’s AI Day 2022 presentation in the video below.