Tesla has quietly changed how it defines “Full Self-Driving,” Electrek reports, in a way that awfully sounds like it’s giving up on CEO Elon Musk’s perennially pushed-back promise that its cars will actually drive themselves without human help.
The change comes in a document outlining a potential and absolutely ludicrous $1 trillion compensation package for Musk that the Tesla board recently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The GDP of a wealthy nation’s worth in stock options, however, is contingent on the automaker achieving key milestones, including the company reaching “10 million active FSD subscriptions.”
FSD — Full Self-Driving — is Tesla’s most advanced driving software that it offers customers. Despite its name, it’s not fully autonomous: the driving mode requires the person behind the wheel to constantly supervise the vehicle and take over at a moment’s notice. That constitutes Level 2 autonomy, as defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers. To keep investors and fans happy, Musk has promised every year for over a decade that his company is on the verge of achieving fully autonomous driving, which would be SAE Level 5.
But how the document goes on to define FSD is so vague that you can’t help but feel that the company is severely hedging its bets. In fact, it doesn’t even mention the SAE’s levels of automation.
“‘FSD’ means an advanced driving system, regardless of the marketing name used, that is capable of performing transportation tasks that provide autonomous or similar functionality under specified driving conditions,” it reads.
The upshot? Tesla can put out something that has “similar functionality” to an autonomous system, without being properly autonomous. As Electrek observes, this is broad enough that Tesla’s current version of FSD could meet this definition. Tesla, theoretically, could rest on its laurels and Musk would still get his payout.
It’s a prime example of the contrast between the grand promises Musk makes to the public and how the company actually describes its tech in the fine print. These public claims, in fact, have frequently landed the automaker in hot water. The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board once lambasted the software as “not full self-driving” but “misleading.” The California DMV sued Tesla for false advertising because of FSD’s name, a legal battle that’s still raging on. In the suit, Tesla lawyers admitted the company’s failure to deliver self-driving, but argued that this wasn’t necessarily fraud.
Amid the legal and regulatory scrutiny, Tesla not-so-subtly changed Full Self-Driving’s name to “Full Self-Driving (Supervised).” This year, it dropped the FSD branding completely in China and redubbed the system “Intelligent Assisted Driving.”
Granted, the downgraded FSD definition could be the board trying to appease Musk by making the milestones easier to reach, but it also betrays a striking lack of ambition and confidence from the company’s leadership. Or you might argue they’re seeing the writing on the wall after years of diminishing progress and deadly crashes — but then you remember this is contained in a proposal to give Musk a trillion dollars, and surmise that maybe these aren’t the individuals possessing the requisite clearheadedness to make such an observation.
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