As the year draws to a close, things are looking rough for Tesla with regard to the stock market. Despite that, the electric vehicle brand is touting its many wins during 2022. One of those is the expansion of its Full Self-Driving technology to some 285,000 vehicles in North America. That’s a win, and a disappointment depending on how you look at it.
In a series of posts on Twitter, Tesla laid out its accomplishments over the last year. On top of ramping up production at Giga Texas and Giga Berlin, it’s reached a milestone of 500,000 solar panel and solar roof installations too. It’s even achieved a new record output of 4680 battery cells in a week equal to more than 1,000 cars.
Perhaps none of that is as big as the news that more than 285,000 Tesla vehicles now have Full Self-Driving Beta enabled across North America with those users having paid from a few thousand dollars a few years back to $15,000 now. A year ago, that number was just 60,000 cars. As of the third quarter of this year, it was 160,000 cars. That means that the ramp-up of Full Self-Driving adoption is happening fast, for now.
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That’s great news for Tesla because more data could mean better updates to autonomous Full Self-Driving technology. Depending on how efficiently it’s sorting through that data and leveraging it for software improvements it could also mean faster updates to FSD Beta as well.
Undoubtedly, it’ll increase the number of unique and tricky situations that the software has to handle in the real world, all of which generate data that the team at Tesla can then use to improve the feature. At the same time, the ramp-up needs to continue for some time if it’s ever going to reach CEO Elon Musk’s predictions.
As DriveTeslaCanada points out, in April, he said that he expected around 1,000,000 cars to have FSD Beta by this time. Even if the take-up rate continues at this blistering 78 % pace, Tesla still won’t have a million FSD Beta users until the middle of next year. Regardless of when that milestone is reached, Tesla has a number of challenging issues surrounding FSD to solve.