TapTechNews May 14 news, prominent Tesla investor and Future Fund Managing Partner Gary Black said that according to data from credit card data provider YipitDate, only 2% of Tesla American owners who received a one-month free trial of FSD subscribed to the service after the trial period ended, compared to his expectation of 6%.
However, he also pointed out that the sample size of Yipit survey is relatively small, with only 3500 users out of 1.8 million trials, so it may not represent the entire Tesla owner group. However, Tesla needs to figure out whether the low acceptance rate is due to low added value or the high price of $99 per month.
On April 28, Tesla CEO Musk visited China. Reuters reported that this was an unexpected visit by Musk to China. An insider said that Musk sought to meet with senior Chinese officials to discuss the launch of FSD software in China. In response to this speculation, Tesla stated that there is currently no timetable for the introduction of FSD to China.
In addition, China Daily reported that the Chinese government has not fully approved the full deployment of FSD in China, but during Musk's recent visit to China, he also proposed testing driverless taxis (Robotaxi) in China.
Tesla's FSD, Full Self-Drive, has already accumulated 1 billion miles of driving. Musk stated that the development of FSDBeta is progressing rapidly, and in the future, its safety will far exceed that of human drivers, reaching a 10x safety level.
Currently, Tesla's autonomous driving products can be divided into 3 categories, including AP, EAP, and FSD. Among them, AP is the basic version, EAP is the enhanced autopilot, adding features such as smart summon, auto parking, NOA, etc. Currently, these two categories of products can be used in China, with the former being free and the latter priced at 32,000 RMB. The highest level FSD mainly includes navigation-assisted driving (NOA), automatic lane change, auto parking, smart summon, traffic light recognition, (navigation-based) city road automatic turning, etc. Currently only available in North America, the US price is $15,000 (approximately 109,000 RMB), or $199 per month (approximately 1441 RMB).
Tesla has introduced Musk's touted end-to-end neural network since FSDv12, meaning that the car control logic is now handled by neural networks rather than code written by programmers, which is hailed as a game-changing technology.
Musk also said that in the future, a FSD update containing three important improvements will be pushed to users approximately every two weeks. In this way, by the end of April or early May, FSD will make a significant leap.
According to Musk's estimate, bi-weekly updates mean that Tesla will release 26 FSD versions per year, potentially exceeding the total number from the past four years. Such frequent updates will bring 78 major improvements to FSD each year.