- Tesla CEO Elon Musk is “confident” that Unsupervised FSD will be available “by the end of this year.”
- This isn’t the first time the outspoken head honcho said Tesla EV owners could enjoy autonomous driving.
- Even if the statement proves to be true this time, don’t get your hopes up, because not everybody will get to enjoy Unsupervised FSD.
Here we go again. During yesterday’s second-quarter earnings call, Tesla CEO Elon Musk promised that Unsupervised FSD would be available “by the end of this year.” That would, in theory, mean that Tesla EV drivers would be able to enjoy autonomous rides in their own cars without having to take the blame if something goes wrong.
In essence, it would mean that Teslas would go from having Level 2-capable driving assistance systems, where the driver is held accountable for any mistake, to running a Level 3 ADAS, where the car–and the carmaker–will be held responsible.
On the surface, it’s very simple. “It’s just a software update away,” a Tesla executive said during yesterday’s call, adding that personal vehicles would run the same hardware as the Robotaxis that are currently giving autonomous rides in Austin, Texas, with a safety driver.
In reality, though, it’s a promise we’ve heard over and over again for nearly a decade. It’s something that Musk has used to pump up investors’ confidence in Tesla, but here we are, in 2025, and it still hasn’t happened. When asked what the timeline for deploying Unsupervised FSD to end users is, Elon Musk had this to say yesterday:
“We’re certainly getting there. I think it will be available for unsupervised personal use by the end of this year in certain geographies. We’re just being very careful about it. We’re just being extremely paranoid, but I’m confident that by the end of this year, within a number of cities in the U.S., it will be available to end users.”
And here’s what Musk said during last year’s Q2 earnings call:
“Based on the current trend, it seems as though we should get the miles between interventions to be high enough that it should be far in excess of humans, that you could do unsupervised, possibly by the end of the year. I would be shocked if we cannot do it next year. Next year seems highly probable to me.”
So there you have it. We might get unsupervised full self-driving on Teslas by the end of this year. Possibly. Definitely. Maybe.
When this does happen, though, it won’t be a country-wide thing–it might not even work on highways. As Musk mentioned, the feature will be limited to a handful of U.S. cities at the beginning.
To Tesla’s credit, it has finally launched its long-awaited Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, albeit in a very limited service area, with safety drivers, and without using the shiny new Cybercab two-seater. Instead, run-of-the-mill Model Ys are being used to ferry some passengers around inside a phallic-shaped geofenced area, which is somehow the main attraction of the whole service.
