Tesla will likely seek approval for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) in Europe and China as early as this year. According to Elon Musk, this could happen already with version 12.5 or 12.6.
Over the past few years, Tesla has been working hard to create technology that will enable fully autonomous driving. At the moment, the company has already achieved significant success in this, but the software still requires the supervision of a human driver. This is one of the obstacles that is holding up the approval of regulatory authorities in various countries.
Starting with version 12, Tesla has achieved an important breakthrough. The team has eliminated the code that prescribes how the car should act in different situations, and now FSD relies on neural networks from image inputs. This allows Tesla cars to drive almost anywhere, albeit under driver supervision.
During the Q2 2024 Earnings Call, Elon Musk said that Tesla’s approach to solving autonomy “is a generalized solution like what everyone else has.” However, he emphasized important differences. For example, Waymo’s solution is very localized, requiring high-density mapping. This makes it quite fragile and greatly limits its ability to expand. Meanwhile, Tesla’s solution is universal and works anywhere.
“It would even work on a different earth. So if you’re rendered a new Earth, it would work on a new earth,” Musk said.
Tesla’s CEO emphasized that the company is now demonstrating the capabilities of FSD; as soon as it can prove that it is safer than a human driver, the technology will be widely accepted. Regulators will be forced to accept it, as it will be difficult to argue when Tesla presents billions of miles of data.
“We are fine that regulators are supportive of deploying deployment of that capability. It’s difficult to argue with if you’ve got a large number of [data] if you’ve got billions of miles that show that in the future unsupervised FSD is safer than humans. What regulator could really stand in the way of that? They would — they’re morally obligated to approve,” Musk said.
The CEO also clarified several important details regarding the deployment of FSD in markets outside of North America. Musk said the company might seek approval with the current version 12.5 or with version 12.6. The first markets where Tesla will look for approval will be Europe and China. This important step could happen as early as this year.
“So with the version 12.5, and maybe a 12.6, but pretty soon we will ask for regulatory approval of the Tesla supervised FSD in Europe, China, and other countries. And I, I think we’re likely to receive that before the end of the year, which will be a helpful demand driver in those regions obviously,” Musk said.
