Tesla Full Self-Driving (FSD) users have passed a significant milestone. As per the electric vehicle maker, Tesla drivers have driven over 1 billion miles on FSD. That’s a cumulative number of miles that exceeds the distance between the Earth and Saturn.
Tesla announced the FSD milestone on its Tesla AI official social media account on X, with the company also providing a graph showing the cumulative miles driven by FSD users over the years. A graph shared by the electric vehicle maker hints that a big ramp in cumulative FSD miles was achieved in recent months. This is no surprise considering the rollout of popular updates like FSD V12.
Tesla’s 1-billion-mile milestone is notable, especially if one were to compare it to the cumulative miles that have been achieved by leading autonomous driving companies in the market today. Waymo, widely considered by Tesla critics as the undisputed leader in self-driving, announced in December 2023 that its vehicles had traveled over 7 million miles in rider-only trips. Cruise announced last July that its fleet had achieved 3 million driverless miles.
Tesla has been pushing FSD (Supervised) V12.3 to consumers recently, with Elon Musk now requiring delivery centers to include a test drive with the advanced driver-assist system as part of the customer vehicle delivery process. The company has also rolled out a free FSD (Supervised) trial for qualified vehicles. These initiatives, if any, will undoubtedly push the FSD program’s cumulative miles even higher.
While Tesla reaching 1 billion cumulative miles is a very impressive milestone, the company likely still has a long way to go before its self-driving system could be fully accepted worldwide. In Master Plan Part Deux, Musk estimated that worldwide regulatory approval for a self-driving system would probably require something on the order of 6 billion miles. Such a milestone, however, would be more than feasible with a much larger fleet of vehicles.
“Even once the software is highly refined and far better than the average human driver, there will still be a significant time gap, varying widely by jurisdiction, before true self-driving is approved by regulators. We expect that worldwide regulatory approval will require something on the order of 6 billion miles (10 billion km). Current fleet learning is happening at just over 3 million miles (5 million km) per day,” Musk wrote back in 2016.
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