Tesla‘s CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that Full Self-Driving is now “100% unsupervised” as the company removes the chase vehicles that had accompanied early robotaxi trips operating without safety monitors inside the cabin.
Responding to a shareholder’s question on Say Technologies — a platform Tesla uses to collect questions every quarter — the chief executive reaffirmed that Tesla 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.
He flagged that there are “unique issues in particular cities” that Tesla wants to make sure “FSD can handle” before deploying the software for personal use.
“There are some pretty nutty intersections where a lot of humans make mistakes and have accidents in various cities,” Musk explained, adding that the company is “actually just being paranoid about safety.”
Tesla is set to “reduce the amount of driver monitoring that’s needed proportionate to the safety of the FSD build,” he concluded.
Last week, Musk had said that autonomy was “essentially a solved problem at this point.”
Software
The software is currently on Version 14.2.2.4, with some “reasoning” features already having rolled out ahead of V14.3 — which the CEO previously flagged as the update in which the car “will feel like it is sentient.”
On Wednesday’s call, Musk said that “if you have a Tesla, you notice with every software update, the car gets better and better at autonomy.”
Another highly upvoted question on Say Technologies came from a retail investor who asked, “what is the current bottleneck to increased Robotaxi deployment & personal use unsupervised FSD?”
VP of AI Software Ashok Elluswamy said Tesla has two goals: “One is to learn as much as possible with the safety monitors. Secondly, be laser-focused with the engineering team to solve the unsupervised FSD problem.”
“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,” Elluswamy noted. “A lot of happy feedback from customers. Since then, we have improved the software significantly as well.”
To him, “customers will continue to see with their own software releases that the software is so good that they’re screaming to remove the trial monitoring software because they’re bored inside the car too much.”
FSD Adoption
During Tesla‘s Annual Shareholder Meeting last November, Musk reaffirmed that, while the company was just “a few months away from solving FSD Unsupervised,” the priority was to “get people aware of FSD.”
One of the targets guiding the CEO’s performance in the upcoming decade is for Tesla to achieve 10 million active FSD subscriptions.
To support this goal, the company has been actively working to increase awareness of FSD.
In the latest earnings call in October, the company’s CFO Vaibhav Taneja said that the total paid FSD customer base was still around 12% of the current fleet.
This Wednesday, Taneja revealed that the software has “nearly 1,100,000 paid customers globally,” of which nearly 70% were “upfront purchases.”
As the company prepares to stop offering the full-purchase option on February 14, the CFO noted that “net additions to this figure will primarily be via subscription model and, in the short term, will impact automotive margins.”
Tesla will offer the software only through a subscription, which costs $99 per month in the US. Up until then, customers can still purchase it for $8,000 there.
In the final month of 2025, Tesla offered North American customers a 30-day trial of FSD 14, timed to coincide with the busy holiday travel season.
According to the latest shareholder deck, Tesla has completed over 7 billion cumulative miles driven with FSD, jumping around 1 billion miles between September and December.
With a recent V14 software update, Tesla owners can also now see how many miles they’ve driven using FSD. Since then, several owners have shared milestones on FSD rides on their vehicles.
These include trips such as the 2,732.4 miles (4,400 km) completed by a Tesla owner on a recent coast-to-coast journey in the US without the system disengaging.
“We continue to believe Tesla is making progress in its AI related efforts, especially with FSD (Supervised) v14, where some users have reported driving multiple thousands of miles between critical intervention on X and FSD v14 getting several positive reviews,” Goldman Sachs analyst Mark Delaney wrote on Thursday.
FSD Availability
Tesla expanded its Full-Self Driving software to Australia and New Zealand in the third quarter. The system was also released in South Korea late last year.
Besides the three markets, it is available in the US, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico.
Despite Tesla’s repeated claims that it expects regulatory approval in Europe and China in the first quarter, officials in both regions have denied the timeline.
Late last year, the company stated on X that it would receive approval of the software by February in the Netherlands.
“RDW has committed to granting Netherlands National approval in February 2026,” Tesla stated, referring to the Dutch authority — which later said approval is not granted.
The two entities have agreed to meet in February so Tesla can demonstrate if the system’s capabilities meet the requirements.
Tesla has conducted tests across several European cities in the past months. As of Tuesday, it can also test the software in the city of Nacka, in Sweden.
The company was previously blocked from testing its assisted-driving software in the capital, Stockholm.
In China, the system was “partially” introduced last year.
One of the company’s struggles with FSD in China was the lack of local training data, which according to Musk was solved by using public videos available online to train with simulation.
After Musk said last week that Tesla would receive approval for the software in the country “hopefully next month,” sources told state-owned China Daily that the information “is not true.”
