Musk: Full Self-Driving customers are 'betting on the future'
Feature requires someone to be sitting in driver's seat and paying attention to operate
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Tesla's Full Self-Driving feature needs work.
That's according to Elon Musk, who said customers paying for the the driver aid, which he claims will one day offer fully autonomous operation of Tesla's vehicles, are "betting on the future."
"Like right now, does it make sense for somebody to do a FSD subscription? I think it's debatable," Musk said.
Tesla this month made the feature available through a monthly subscription priced at $99 or $199, depending on the model of vehicle, so drivers could try it without paying the full $10,000 upfront price for the option. But don't expect those prices to stick.
"I mean, any given price is going to be wrong, so we'll adjust it over time as we see the value proposition makes sense to people," Musk said.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TSLA | TESLA INC. | 162.13 | +17.45 | +12.06% |
Full Self-Driving currently allows a Tesla to steer itself within a lane, pass other cars, park, drive itself through a parking lot to pick up the owner and respond to traffic lights and stop signs. A Beta version of the software available to a small group of testers adds additional functionality that includes the ability to drive on city streets. Videos posted online by owners have shown it to be far from perfect in its operation at this stage and it requires someone to be sitting in the driver's seat and paying attention to operate.
Much of Tesla's $650 billion valuation is tied to the promise of the company launching a fully autonomous ride-hailing service using customer vehicles equipped with Full Self-Driving.
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Musk said once Tesla can prove the system operates more safely than an average human driver it will be "unconscionable" for government regulators to not allow it. He went on to compare cars with Full Self-Driving to elevators without human operators.
"Back in the day, we used to have elevator operators with a big switch that -- and they were to operate the elevator and move between floors. But they get tired or maybe drunk or something or distracted and every now and again, somebody would be kind of sheared in half between floors," Musk said.
"That's kind of the situation we have with cars. Autonomy will become so safe that it will be unsafe to manually operate the car, relatively speaking."