Tesla is now offering a free one month trail of Full Self-Driving (FSD) Capability for new vehicle buyers, in another effort to increase the visibility of FSD Beta among customers.
UPDATE: Elon Musk has said that all FSD capable cars in the US will also receive a one month free trial, which will be sent out to cars later this week. Based on the comment specifying US and not North America, we presume this means Canada will not be part of this offer.
All US cars that are capable of FSD will be enabled for a one month trial this week
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2024
Tesla has been developing FSD Beta for a number of years, and while the software has seen significant progress over that time, the driver-assist feature was still quite “jerky” in its movements. Part of the reason for this was that Tesla was prioritizing safety over smoothness, with CEO Elon Musk saying last year that once safety is at an acceptable level, only then will Tesla “polish the experience.”
Tesla took perhaps its biggest step in its quest for developing FSD with the recent release of v12, which removed hundreds of thousands of lines of code and replaced it with end-to-end neural nets. This fundamental change was promised to deliver a significant improvement over previous versions, and feedback from owners in the US show that it appears to be living up to the hype and is much more human-like in its behaviours and decision making, resulting in a much smoother experience for the driver and passengers.
Last year Musk promised a free FSD trial for all cars in North America once the software was “super smooth.” Apparently Musk believes they have reached that level and Tesla is now offering a free one month trial of FSD. Unfortunately the offer isn’t available to all cars as Musk suggested, but only on new vehicle purchases, according to an update to the Design Studio on Monday evening.
This offer is available in both Canada and the US. The new Model 3 is not included in the offer as Autopilot and FSD are still unavailable on the vehicle.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the offer isn’t very visible in the online configurator, but hopefully Tesla updates this and makes it more prominent to potential buyers.
Previously, the only way for a new buyer to get a free trial of FSD was to use a referral code, which would give you the software for three months, and more recently a one year trial of Premium Connectivity. Now all customers will get a one month trial without a referral code.
The launch of this free FSD trial comes on the same day that Musk instructed employees to give a supervised demo of the driver-assist feature, both to new car buyers and to owners picking their car up from a service visit.
