Tesla has been rolling out updates left and right recently. Some of these have included updates to its semi-autonomous driving system, Full Self-Driving (FSD). While FSD has been beta-tested by a somewhat small group of drivers in the past few months, Elon Musk says it’s just about ready for a wider audience. So when will FSD be available, and can everyone with a Tesla get it? 

People have been wondering when they can get Full Self-Driving

On Wednesday, September 1, 2021, Elon Musk tweeted that Tesla’s Full Self-Driving 10 will be available next Friday, September 10. This comes not long after Musk said FSD 10 will be available to the public by the end of September.  

While Tesla Full Self-Driving has been available for several months, it wasn’t publicly available. Until now only a small number of people have been able to download the FSD update. These are mostly Tesla employees. With FSD being such a novel and hyped-up feature, it’s no surprise that people have been asking when it would be available. 

On August 25, Musk tweeted, “In a tweet reply to someone asking about the FSD public release timeline, Musk said, “We should be there with Beta 10, which goes out a week from Friday (no point release this week). It will have a completely retrained NN, so will need another few weeks after that for tuning & bug fixes. Best guess is a public beta button in ~4 weeks.”

Musk says that FSD 10.1 will be available to the general public two weeks later

It isn’t clear who exactly will have access to FSD on September 10, 2021. According to Electrek, it’s possible that it “may be a closed beta, perhaps limited to drivers who have already opted into the FSD Beta program.”

Yet it shouldn’t be too long after that when the general public can download Full Self-Driving. Mursk sent a follow-up tweet saying that he hoped that 10.1 would be available to the general public some two weeks after the release of FSD 10.

It could be some time before other countries get Full Self-Driving

Naturally Tesla drivers in other countries are wondering when FSD will be available to them. When a Twitter user asked Musk about FSD in Canada, Musk responded with, “Not sure, but maybe a few months. In general for any region, we need to make software work well, test it extensively & then get regulatory approval. If we could go faster while being safe, we would!”

Tesla has good reason to want to take their time with the Full Self-Driving release. In the United States, Tesla has come under fire for its advertisement of FSD and Autopilot, its other semi-autonomous system. Two senators want Tesla investigated for touting that these systems are autonomous, when really they are only Level 2. This means that a user still has to be in full control of the vehicle at all times. 

Hopefully the Tesla Full Self-Driving 10 fixes some of the problems with FSD. If the beta release of FSD 10 goes well, it’s possible that we’ll get a better idea of how Full Self-Driving really operates two weeks after that. Once FSD is available to the public, it will be interesting to see how the roads are impacted – for better and for worse.