Tesla has promoted Phil Duan, the software lead for its Full Self-Driving (FSD) program, to Director of Engineering for Autopilot.
The move was first reported on Monday by X user Fred Lambert after Duan updated his role in the company to Director of Engineering from the previous Principal Software Engineer.
Duan led the release of FSD 14, Tesla’s latest self-driving software. He also oversaw the launch of Tesla’s Robotaxi ride-hailing service, which operates through unsupervised FSD.
Career
The engineer started working for Tesla in 2017, as a Senior Software Engineer for Autopilot. From late 2018, he was a Staff Software Engineer and a “perception tech lead.”
Duan briefly left Tesla between October 2019 and June 2020 to join the autonomous vehicles-focused Amazon subsidiary Zoox, as a Senior Software Engineer for Prediction.
As Staff Software Engineer from July 2020 to February 2022, he created the Occupancy Network and “helped build the world’s largest physical AI data engine.”
He was promoted to Sr. Staff Software Engineer in March 2022, where he co-led the FSD v12 and v13 releases and led the AI team for data and perception.
As Principal Software Engineer from March to December 2025, he led the Robotaxi launch and FSD v14 release.
Musk labelled V14 the “second biggest update to Tesla AI/Autopilot ever after V12,” with the number of miles between interventions increasing substantially with the new update.
Robotaxi Updates
Tesla has begun offering Robotaxi rides using a fleet of modified Model Ys last June, while production of the upcoming Cybercab — specifically designed for the service — is scheduled to start in April.
Late last year, Phil Duan was one of the first Tesla employees to ride in a fully driverless Robotaxi with no safety drivers inside the vehicle.
“Along for the ride in unsupervised FSD testing,” Duan wrote then, captioning the video he shared.
A month later, CEO Elon Musk announced that these rides had been opened to the public — though only a “few” vehicles in the fleet were available, and each was followed by a chase car for safety.
During Tesla’s latest earnings call late last month, Musk said the company was removing those chase vehicles, reaffirming that it has “cars operating with no one in them and no safety monitor and no follow car or anything like that in Austin right now.”
However, “for customers, we’re just being very cautious with the rollout,” Musk added.
FSD Updates
FSD 14 launched in October and is currently on Version 14.2.2.4.
While Musk said the V14.3 update would make the car “feel like it is sentient,” VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy said last month that some “reasoning” features have already rolled out ahead with the latest updates.
In the latest earnings call, the VP added that “a variant of the software that’s used for the Robotaxis service was shipped to customers with v14, and customers saw a huge jump in performance.”
As the company works towards achieving 100% unsupervised self-driving — with Musk saying it already is — adoption of the service is a key step to the company.
According to the latest figures, Tesla‘s software reached “nearly 1,100,000 paid customers globally,” of which nearly 70% were “upfront purchases.”
Tesla will stop accepting one-time payments to purchase the software on February 14. It will only be available through a subscription.
It remains unclear what the conditions to access Unsupervised FSD will be for customers who purchased FSD (Supervised).
Additionally, and while the specific figures have not yet been revealed by the company, Musk wrote on X last month that “the $99/month for supervised FSD will rise as FSD’s capabilities improve.”
“The massive value jump is when you can be on your phone or sleeping for the entire ride (unsupervised FSD),” he said.
At the same time, Tesla is facing regulatory hurdles in both Europe and China to get approval for the software.
Over the weekend, Israel’s Ministry of Transportation approved Tesla to test supervised autonomous driving on public roads, as the country seeks to position itself as a global hub for smart vehicle technology.
