Tesla continues to publish movies of its automobiles driving autonomously, with an worker within the driver’s seat, as proof that it’s making progress in autonomous driving.
Nonetheless, there’s one factor that Tesla has by no means shared, and that’s precise knowledge.
Over the previous few months, Tesla has been constantly posting movies of its ‘Full Self-Driving’ (FSD) testing in numerous nations, in addition to movies of homeowners testing FSD Supervised v13 in their very own automobiles in North America.
When requested for proof of Tesla’s progress towards autonomous driving, CEO Elon Musk usually factors individuals to these movies, or he suggests attempting Tesla’s FSD Supervised themselves.
Nonetheless, that is anecdotal proof at finest. Whereas it may be spectacular, it’s not a dependable metric for monitoring progress towards Tesla’s promise of unsupervised self-driving in buyer automobiles.
At this level, anybody who has skilled Tesla’s newest variations of FSD is totally conscious that the system is able to doing these drives with out intervention, which is all these movies show. Not even essentially the most outstanding critics of Tesla’s strategy to deploying autonomous driving applied sciences are denying that.
The actual query is how reliably Tesla FSD can carry out these drives over thousands and thousands of miles with out intervention.
Tesla has by no means launched any knowledge about that. By no means. Not as soon as.
The one knowledge that Tesla releases are the general mileage on FSD (left) and its quarterly Autopilot security report (proper):
The cumulative mileage shouldn’t be significantly useful for something apart from monitoring the utilization. Concerning the Autopilot security report, it’s marred by issues stemming from the self–reporting crashes and a highway kind bias, as Autopilot is primarily designed to be used on highways.
Tesla additionally doesn’t differentiate between Autopilot and FSD in its security report.
We would like precise Tesla FSD Knowledge
It’s not excellent, however the one legitimate metric that Tesla may share is its mileage between disengagements on FSD.
In September 2024, Tesla started releasing month-to-month AI/self-driving roadmap updates, referencing enhancements within the variety of miles between disengagements as an vital metric to trace progress.
Unsurprisingly, Tesla ceased releasing month-to-month updates after lacking a number of key milestones simply two months into beginning the month-to-month updates.
Probably the most telling a part of Tesla’s month-to-month AI replace is that it referenced particular enhancements in miles between disengagements, for instance, a ‘4x’ enchancment, but it surely by no means shared Tesla’s base knowledge or remaining miles between disengagements, simply the a number of elements of enchancment.
Briefly, Tesla claims to have 4.5 billion miles of FSD knowledge, and it has by no means shared any. But, the month-to-month stories’ mentions of miles between disengagements show that Tesla is monitoring it. It’s simply not sharing it.
Some individuals would see this as a purple flag.
Crowdsource Tesla FSD knowledge
Since Tesla doesn’t share any knowledge, now we have to depend on crowdsourced knowledge from FSD customers. There’s a dataset with a whole bunch of hundreds of miles, which is rather a lot fewer than Tesla’s personal knowledge, however it’s the finest out there.
Tesla followers and shareholders usually dismiss this dataset. Nonetheless, Musk himself has publicly positively shared it on two events, which means that it’s a minimum of within the ballpark of the official knowledge that Tesla intently guards.
The dataset at present has 40,000 miles on FSD v13.2.9, the most recent FSD replace on HW4 automobiles, and miles between important disengagement at present stands at 342 miles:
Curiously, the system has been regressing all year long.
If we take the common of all the opposite FSD v13.2 updates, which have over 50,000 miles of information, the system was averaging over 500 miles between important disengagements all through 2025:
This really aligns with Tesla’s personal Autopilot security knowledge, which additionally confirmed a regression in 2025.
A number of different firms creating autonomous driving applied sciences have reported miles between disengagements within the tens of hundreds of miles.
Ashok Elluswamy, the pinnacle of FSD at Tesla, has beforehand said that for Tesla to allow unsupervised self-driving, Tesla wants to attain the common in miles per important intervention “equal of human miles between collision,” which stands at 700,000 miles, in keeping with NHTSA.
Electrek’s Take
I feel it’s important to ascertain metrics to trace progress generally. However on high of frequent sense, as somebody who purchased FSD and was promised it might turn out to be unsupervised self-driving, I feel I’m owed a method to monitor progress past “simply take a look at this anecdotal video proof.”
After dozens of missed deadlines to ship on what I purchased, Tesla expects us to easily belief them.
I do know that Tesla is worried in regards to the media and naysayers decoding the information in a unfavorable mild, such because the regressions we’re seeing, however that’s a part of the sport. Tesla itself admits that it’s a “two steps ahead, one step again” type of improvement.
They’re attempting to deploy a doubtlessly life-saving know-how, however additionally it is a doubtlessly tremendous harmful know-how. We want methods to trace progress.
The shortage of transparency is a purple flag.
Tesla actually posted month-to-month stories for 2 months earlier than giving up, and people stories didn’t even have legitimate trackable knowledge.
Once more, the movies are solely spectacular if you realize nothing about FSD. I do know that FSD can carry out these drivers over just a few miles, even over just a few hundred miles, with out intervention. Nobody is questioning that.
But it surely must do it constantly over a whole bunch of hundreds of miles, and we will’t monitor progress towards that with these movies. Interval.
Till then, it’s all vaporware.
That is coming from somebody who purchased FSD and believes that if Tesla have been creating FSD with out promoting unsupervised self-driving to prospects and utilizing it to promote automobiles by claiming issues prefer it turns Tesla’s automobiles into “appreciating property”, it might be a celebrated product and Tesla can be seen as a pacesetter in creating autonomous driving applied sciences solely on pc imaginative and prescient.
Nonetheless, this isn’t the world we reside in.
We reside in a world the place Tesla has been promoting “Full Self-Driving” with the promise that it’s going to turn out to be “unsupervised” for as much as $15,000, and it has been claiming that it’s on the verge of occurring yearly for the final six years.
Share the information or shut up about it.
