The number of Tesla drivers enrolled in the Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta testing program has grown significantly after the company made the driver-assist software available to all owners who have purchased or subscribed to FSD Capability.
In the company’s Q3 2022 shareholder deck published in October 2022 Tesla said there were approximately 160,000 FSD Beta testers in North America. Three months later, and after the wide release of FSD Beta, that number has grown to approximately 285,000 at the end of 2022, according to a tweet from Tesla on December 29.
If that 78% increase in about 3 months wasn’t impressive enough, Tesla says the number of FSD Beta testers in Canada and the US is now approximately 400,000. The figure was included in the Q4 2020 shareholder deck published yesterday, January 25, 2023, meaning the number of testers grew a staggering 40% in about 3 weeks.
Along with the increase in the number of FSD Beta testers, there has been an equally sharp rise in the number miles driven with FSD Beta engaged. At the end of Q4 2022 Tesla owners had driven approximately 90 million miles, up from the less than 60 million miles that had been accumulated at the end of Q3 2022.
Tesla also shared this graph showing the exponential growth in the number of miles driven with FSD Beta engaged.
According to Tesla they have now deployed FSD Beta to “nearly all customers” in North America who have purchased or subscribed to FSD, meaning there will be no significant change to the number of testers until the program is expanded outside of North America. The next region to receive FSD Beta looks like it will be Europe, but as we have seen in the past there are significant regulatory hurdles to overcome before that becomes a reality. While they wait for those approvals, Tesla has been laying the groundwork and testing FSD Beta in Europe with employees for over one year.
In North America the next big thing FSD Beta testers are waiting for is the release of V11, which will merge the highway and city driving stacks into a single neural net. This release was supposed to happen last summer, then before Halloween, and it is still waiting for a deployment to the masses. As of the most recent update from Musk, it should be released any day now, but given how many delays there have been already, we aren’t holding our breath waiting for it.
