Tesla reaches Musk’s threshold for “safe unsupervised” driving.

We’ve crossed another of Elon Musk’s autonomous driving thresholds. The fleet of Tesla vehicles using the company’s Full Self-Driving (supervised) system has driven more than 10 billion miles, according to a company report. Updated safety page. This means that the company has It crossed the line that Musk set earlier this year For “safe unsupervised” driving.

But Tesla owners didn’t suddenly wake up today to find their FSD (supervised) cars turned into FSD (unsupervised) cars. FSD is still just a second-level system that requires a fully attentive human driver behind the wheel to monitor the road and be ready to take over at a moment’s notice.

In January, Musk said on the

Naturally, this would have been a very risky move by Tesla, especially when there are still a lot of questions about the company’s willingness to accept legal responsibility for more than a million vehicles affected by FSD. When a Waymo vehicle is responsible for an accident, Waymo takes responsibility because it owns the technology and the fleet. But Tesla’s terms of service put the responsibility on the owner, based on its description of the FSD system as a Level 2 supervised system. What happens when FSD goes unsupervised? Who bears responsibility for the collapse then?

It’s not clear if Tesla has figured this out yet. Over the years, there have been hundreds of crashes involving Tesla’s partially autonomous features and dozens of deaths. But the company has managed to avoid liability, either by settling with victims or convincing the courts to dismiss the lawsuits. On its websiteTesla asserts that FSD (supervision) “requires active driver supervision and does not make the vehicle autonomous.”

A federal jury in Florida last year Tesla found partly responsible Due to a fatal accident in 2019 involving the company’s automated driver assistance program, and The company was ordered to pay $243 million to the families of the victims. Tesla appealed the rulingBut the judge rejected that effort.

However, it is worth acknowledging the amazing achievement of 10 billion miles traveled in FSD (supervised). Tesla claims that its FSD-equipped cars travel an average of 5.5 million miles before a major crash, compared to 660,000 miles for the average American driver. Tesla is touting this as proof that FSD is safer than human driving.

Experts have long questioned Tesla’s methodology. Studies have shown that company safety reports fail to take into account basic facts about traffic statistics, such as that crashes are more common on city roads and undivided roads than on highways, where Autopilot is more often used. Some researchers believe Tesla may have miscounted accidents in order to make Autopilot and FSD appear safer than they actually are.

Unsupervised driving may still be a long way off for Tesla customers, but the company is ramping up its use of unattended vehicles in its robotaxi fleet. After launching in Dallas and Houston with just two vehicles, Tesla has since added more vehicles to its fleet. Dallas now has five unsupervised robo-taxis, while Houston has six, according to Robotaxi tracker. Austin, where Tesla first launched its robotaxi service, now has 29 supervised vehicles (employees in the front passenger seat) and 22 unattended vehicles.

Naturally, this makes many Tesla owners feel like they are very close to unsupervised driving. But questions about responsibility are likely to continue to delay their arrival. In a phone call last month, Musk said unsupervised driving comes when “it becomes legal to do so.” When asked specifically about unsupervised FSD in customer vehicles, he expected it to arrive in the fourth quarter of the year.

Another threshold or another target that will inevitably move?