Tesla has revealed that it is in discussions with another major carmaker to license its full-self-driving (FSD) technology.
In the Q2 earnings call, earlier today, Tesla CEO Elon Musk highlighted the importance of FSD technology that the all-electric carmaker is focusing on:
“Something I want to emphasise really strongly, it is a very important point, is that, just as with the North America Charging Standard, although we are not licensing that, we are just making it available, but we are very open to licensing our full-self-driving software and hardware to other car companies.
“We are already in discussions with, early discussions, with a major OEM about using the Tesla FSD, so we are not trying to keep it to ourselves, we are more than happy to license it to others.”
It’s unclear at this point on who this car maker could be but as the discussions continue, we are likely to hear about it at the next investor’s meeting.
Musk also went through the reasoning behind the licensing of its FSD suite which the company has spent billions of dollars developing and continues to invest heavily into achieving its EV and autonomy goals:
“We strongly believe in helping other car companies to accelerate the EV revolution and just trying to do the right thing,” he said.
This was well received by the Tesla investors as it is another stream of income that Tesla is yet to realise in the coming years.
As the development continues, Tesla has faced many challenges which are being overcome with each release of the Beta version available to Tesla drivers in the US.
With the Beta program increasing its usage, Musk also highlighted that the system had clocked over 300 million miles:
“Today over 300 million miles have been driven, using FSD Beta, that 300 million mile data is going to feel small,”, Musk mentioned.
To finalise the update on FSD, Musk re-itterated the goal for the system to ramp its usage significantly amongst the Tesla fleet and making the roads safer than they are today:
“Very quickly, it’ll soon be billions of miles before tens of billions of miles, FSD will then go from being better than a human to being vastly better than a human. We see a clear path for full-self-driving being ten times safer than an average human driver.”
The company has been broadening the rollout of FSD Beta trials to other international markets in recent months.
This was seen with “Test Operator” roles advertised in Europe in various countries including Finland, Switzerland, Spain, Norway, Italy, Turkiye, Austria, The Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. More recently similar roles have also appeared in Australia.
The licensing of FSD to other car makers is also a positive sign that the expansion is on a global scale in the coming years.
With the system and computing needed to expand on its development only improving, it’s likely that the breakthrough could be on its way which will reshape the way people use our roads forever.
Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.