For the first time Tesla CEO Elon Musk has given us an idea about the number of customers who have purchased the Full Self-Driving (FSD) Capability option for their vehicles.
Musk has previously said there are about 100,000 FSD Beta testers in the United States and Canada, a figure he provided during a TED2022 interview in April.
That figure however does not give us a true sense into how many have purchased the option as the current group of testers is limited to those with a high Safety Score, and is only available to those within North America.
Tesla has never published or talked about how many customers have purchased FSD in any concrete terms, until now.
During a wide-ranging interview at the All-In Summit on Monday, Musk said there will about about 1,000,000 FSD Beta testers by the end of the year.
“There’s about 100,000 people in the beta, so it’s not tiny. And we’ll be expanding that to, I don’t know, probably 1 million people, on that order by the end of the year,” Musk said.
One million is a significant number, especially when you consider Tesla has only sold a little over 2 million cars since its inception.
The fact that not all of their vehicles are capable of running FSD Beta also has to be taken into account, as cars built up to 2016 did not have the necessary hardware. Even that date is not 100% accurate as Tesla only introduced HW3.0 in 2019, although offers free retrofits to owners who don’t have the latest computer but have purchased FSD.
A take rate around 50% is very different from unofficial figures we saw last year. According to data complied from more than 17,000 customers by Tesla delivery tracker @TroyTeslike, the FSD take rate has never topped 50%, with the closest it ever came to that level being in Q2 2019 when 46% of customers surveyed purchased the option.
Outside of that quarter, and the two following it, Troy’s data showed between 11% and 25% of customers forked out the extra money for the option.
A prediction of 1 million FSD Beta testers by the end of the year either implies a take rate higher than previously thought, or that Musk is expecting a high percentage of customers to take delivery of their cars with the feature over the next 6 months. While we can’t say for sure, it is likely a little bit of both, especially when you consider FSD Capability now costs a hefty $12,000 USD/$12,800 CAD.
You can watch Elon’s full interview below. The segment about FSD starts at 16:58.
