Last Thursday was Tesla‘s AI Day, and in addition to some of the wild projects Elon Musk has in store has for the company, we might’ve also gotten a clue about something that could be a huge step in the push towards autonomous vehicles. Namely, the possibility that the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology could be licensed out to other brands.
At the AI Day event, Autocar asked Musk if Tesla would consider making their FSD software open-source, to which he replied: “Well, it is fundamentally extremely expensive to create the system, so somehow that has to be paid for. Unless people want to work for free. But I should say that, if other car companies want to license it and use it in their cars, that’d be cool. This is not intended to just be limited to Tesla cars.”
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The benefit of this would be that development costs for automakers’ own self-driving technologies could be greatly reduced, which would make it more feasible to include in their vehicles. This in turn could theoretically lead to more vehicles on the road that feature autonomous driving capabilities, although it’s unclear what the resulting cost for consumers would be, seeing as Tesla charges their own customers $10,000 outright or $199 per month for the tech.
We’ve seen in the past that Musk is no stranger to sharing Tesla’s ideas if it means furthering the industry, as just last month, he announced that the company’s vast Supercharger network would for the first time be available for non-Tesla vehicles later this year.
