Elon Musk is again updating the timeline for Tesla’s new Full Self-Driving v9 beta update, which is apparently now slipping to next week.
Tesla’s new FSD subscription model should follow at the same time.
Tesla Full Self-Driving beta
Tesla is currently testing the “feature complete” version of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package in beta with a few thousand customers and employees through its early access program.
It’s not considered autonomous driving yet because the driver is still responsible for the vehicle and needs to be ready to take control at all times, but Tesla’s system performs all other driving tasks autonomously, including driving through intersections.
Tesla hopes that it can keep improving on the system with customer feedback until it can gather enough data to show that it’s safer than human driving.
Over the last few months, CEO Elon Musk has been talking about Tesla moving to a new generation (v9) of its FSD software that will remove reliance on radar readings and instead have everything done through computer vision based on cameras.
Tesla already pushed its first version of the software without radar support, but the first big iteration has been dubbed FSD v9.
The update has been pushed a few times. Most recently, Musk said that it should be coming “no later than June.”
Last month, the CEO did say that Tesla would release a “first step” toward that update first.
At the end of May, Tesla started moving all North American Model 3 and Model Y vehicles to a camera-only computer vision system.
At the time, Musk said that Tesla FSD v9 would be coming in “about 3 weeks.”
A month later, the update is still not here, and Musk is now saying that it will “hopefully” be launching next week:
I’m driving “alpha” 9, but we need to fix some obvious issues before releasing beta 9, hopefully next week.
It will most likely mean that the update will slip into July.
Again, this is the software update that Musk has been hyping up as “mind-blowing” and an important step toward Tesla achieving true full self-driving capabilities.
Tesla FSD subscription
Last year, we reported on indications that Tesla is working on a pay-as-you-go subscription for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) package.
Later, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that Tesla planned to release such an option “toward the end of 2020.” That never happened, and the release was later pushed by the CEO to “early 2021.”
In March, Musk said that it will “for sure” happen during the second quarter of 2021.
In April, the CEO said that the subscription is a “sure thing” for May, but that also didn’t happen, and now Musk has attached the release of the subscription option to the release of v9, which has also been delayed, as discussed above.
With the new timeline of “hopefully next week,” Musk said that the subscription model will be made available through the Tesla app:
FSD subscription capability should be turning on via the Tesla app.
The FSD subscription is expected to give access to the FSD features to a lot more people, since it’s going to be an alternative to paying $10,000 for the FSD package, which is currently the only option.
But it will not be a cheap monthly fee.
Tesla has made it clear that outright buying the package is going to be better financially, which means that the monthly cost of the subscription is likely going to be over $100 per month.
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Author: Fred Lambert
Source: Electrek
