Tesla “Full Self Driving” Could Come To Other Countries Before Long

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Ever since Tesla started rolling out Full Self Driving (FSD) to non-employee Tesla owners in the US, people in other countries have been asking when they’ll be able to install and use FSD. As far as I remember, it’s always been a vague “someday…” kind of response. That hasn’t really changed, but some comments from the Tesla conference call today had me feeling like the day may actually be coming soon — perhaps in 2024, that is.

First of all, I think one thing has to be said: before FSD version 12, the experience was so bad that I think Elon Musk was very concerned about trying to get regulatory approval and rollout in other countries. Many, many Tesla owners with FSD — who, as you can assume, were supportive and open minded Tesla drivers — were surprised at how bad the system worked, and how many times it would make the car do crazy things. With version 12 working much better, and just simply being much more natural and smooth in how it drives, it’s finally at the point where it would maybe be safe to try to get it rolling in more places.

Secondly, I found one segment of today’s conference call interesting on this matter. There are a few quotes here I’m going to discuss. “The thing about the end-to-end neural net based autonomy is that, just like a human, it works pretty well without modification in almost any market,” Elon Musk said. So, he’s saying that, even without much change, FSD will respond to traffic lights, avoid hitting other cars or objects, and stay in the lane it’s supposed to be driving in. “So, we plan on, with the approval of the regulators, releasing it as a supervised autonomy system — in any market where we can get regulatory approval for that, which includes China. You know, just like a human, you can go rent a car in a foreign country and you can drive pretty well. Obviously, if you live in a country, you can drive better. And so, we’ll make a car drive better in these other countries with country-specific training. But it can drive quite well almost anywhere.”

There were also some comments from Ashok Elluswamy about making some small changes based on different laws and standards in different markets but not needing to make big changes to the software stack. For example, in South Asian countries, they are much more strict about not crossing solid lane markings when changing lanes, they pointed out. It’s not 100% clear how Tesla would adjust things for those other markets, but the key point they emphasized was that it wouldn’t take a ton of work. I’d still like to know more about how the system would be modified to adjust to different laws and standards.

There were no clear statements on when Tesla would go into these other places with FSD, but with Musk specifically mentioning China, and with China being such a big and competitive market for Tesla, I imagine the company could try to bring FSD there soon-ish in order to have a feature that could set it apart against rivals, and also because some of its competitors already have highly effective driver-assist suites that Tesla lacks (most notably, Xpeng’s system is far beyond what Tesla offers in China).

Tesla just recently slashed the price of FSD from $12,000 to $8,000 in the US. Part of this is, no doubt, to increase the take rate (the % of Tesla owners buying it), but I think part of this is also just that the system has gotten good enough that Tesla is comfortable having more people use it — that people won’t be shocked at how bad it is as they might have been (should have been) a few months ago. Again, this is a signal to me that Tesla would be more comfortable bringing it to more markets now as well.

Now, I’ve certainly got some concerns about Tesla potentially rolling out FSD in more countries, but I’ll leave that for a video I’m planning to make soon (tomorrow probably), because that’s all part of a much broader discussion around what FSD is and what it could become.

In the meantime, any guesses on which country outside North America Tesla will bring FSD to first? I lean toward it being the UAE, but let me know your thoughts.