Tesla opens floodgates for self-driving owners
Tesla Inc. is making its controversial driver-assistance system available to customers previously deemed not safe enough.
CEO Elon Musk tweeted Full Self-driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who’s bought the option and requests it from their car screen. Until now, some paying customers have been blocked from accessing FSD because they didn’t score high enough on metrics Tesla uses to set insurance rates.
FSD hasn’t lived up to Musk’s statements. He first announced his plan to sell it in October 2016, a few months after he told a tech conference that he considered autonomous driving to be “basically a solved problem.” In 2019, he said that within roughly a year, Tesla’s technology would advance to the point no human would need to be behind the wheel.
Those predictions haven’t panned out: FSD still requires a fully attentive driver to keep their hands on the wheel and be ready to take over at any moment. This disconnect has opened up legal and regulatory risk:
❚ The U.S. Justice Department and SEC are investigating Tesla’s self-driving claims, a person familiar with the matter said.
❚ A customer in California is seeking class action status claiming Tesla has deceptively marketed its driver-assistance systems.
❚ California accused the company in August of misleading consumers about its FSD and Autopilot systems.
When asked in March when Europeans will get to test FSD, Musk said at the plant Tesla was opening near Berlin that the firm was holding off because of regulators.
“In the U.S., things are legal by default,” Musk said. “In Europe, they’re illegal by default. So we have to get approval beforehand.”
The U.S, National Highway Transportation Safety Board, which lacks the power to compel carmakers to follow its recommendations, has been critical of Tesla’s deployment of Autopilot and FSD.
“We essentially have the Wild West on our roads right now,” NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy told Bloomberg earlier this year. “It is a disaster waiting to happen.”