On November 19, Elon Musk announced Full-Self Driving would have a wide release. At the time, it was not clear if he was talking about Tesla’s advanced driver assistance system finally achieving stable release status or if the company was just tired of holding back whatever it had to offer. On November 24, he confirmed the latter was true.
According to the Tesla CEO, FSD 10.69.3.1 “is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen.” He refers to it as Full Self-Driving Beta, which makes it clear that this is a more widespread “test” with untrained drivers on public roads. Should anything go wrong, with more fatal crashes than the 19 Tesla already had with its advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), the company will just bring up that “beta” and its legal disclaimers to state it had nothing to do with that and that the drivers are to blame.
Madeleine Clare Elish classified that practice as “moral crumple zones,” meaning that drivers work like crumple zones in a car because they end up bearing “the brunt of the moral and legal responsibilities when the overall system malfunctions. While the crumple zone in a car is meant to protect the human driver, the moral crumple zone protects the integrity of the technological system, at the expense of the nearest human operator.”
Obviously, only those who paid to become “moral crumple zones” get that privilege. It now costs $15,000, with a more flexible subscription model that only charges you $199 per month. You need to have Enhanced Autopilot on your car, to which you can also subscribe for $99 per month. There’s another eligibility requirement: HW 3.0, which Elon Musk promised all vehicles made on and after April 22, 2019, would have. That was not the case. In China, Tesla was forced to retrofit the right computer for customers getting HW 2.5.
Several traffic safety specialists – including Ralph Nader – have urged the U.S. government to remove FSD from public roads. Autopilot is currently under investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for crashing against emergency vehicles. The wide release of beta software may put up around 264,700 on American roads, or 164,700 more than it already had. It is probably why Tesla updated its Safety Score Beta to prevent people from driving at night: Tesla Vision relies only on the car's cameras.
To make matters worse, the first YouTube video to evaluate FSD 10.69.3.1 said it is the “most confused version ever.” Despite that, Musk congratulated the “Tesla Autopilot/AI team on achieving a major milestone.” Without a stable release of its ADAS, we have no idea what landmark he is talking about apart from exposing more people to a critical safety feature that is not even ready yet.
Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta is now available to anyone in North America who requests it from the car screen, assuming you have bought this option.
Congrats to Tesla Autopilot/AI team on achieving a major milestone!
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