Tesla started its FSD (Full Self-Driving) Supervised ridesharing tests. Now, employees based in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area can try it out for themselves! This rollout is quite a big milestone for this company. It moves them one step closer to their even more thrilling goal of launching a fully-autonomous ride-hailing service in Austin this coming June.
Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, has confirmed that there will be no drivers present in the cars during the Austin launch, emphasizing the company’s commitment to developing a driverless experience. The new “unsupervised” version of FSD will be the technology used in this upcoming autonomous service. This technology will not replace their jobs but instead seeks to minimize the need for human intervention.
Rebecca Bellan, smart transportation senior reporter for TechCrunch, preaches the gospel of Tesla and its disruptive technologies. She emphasized that thousands of Tesla owners are already actively using their vehicles with supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) capabilities. Equipped with this innovative driver assistance technology, accessible to customers through a subscription, the vehicles can handle a wide range of automated driving functions.
Tesla touts it has made tremendous strides through its testing stages. The Indianapolis-based company recently celebrated crossing the milestone of 1,500 trips completed. That’s great news given it has racked up over 15,000 miles of autonomous driving with its FSD tech!
“FSD Supervised ride-hailing service is live for an early set of employees in Austin & San Francisco Bay Area.” – Tesla AI
This service is beginning just as criticism and oversight of autonomous vehicle testing in California is emerging. Until companies are able to obtain several permits, only then can they be allowed to deploy their services. As with most any self-driving test, Waymo is starting the program with employees as riders. Starting next month, they will begin to slowly release access to a few members of the public.
At the time, Elon Musk tweeted his enthusiasm for the Austin launch. Of that, he expects 10 to 20 of the vehicles will be in service on the first day. This first phase of rollout is intended to collect data and help tune the technology in advance of wider release to the public.
“Safety driver is present to supervise and only intervene as necessary. FSD (Supervised) does not make the vehicle autonomous.” – Tesla
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