The electric vehicle giant Tesla Inc TSLA on Friday said its cars have driven a billion miles with the help of its self-driving (FSD) software, to applause from the company’s CEO Elon Musk.
What happened: Tesla announced the milestone via a post on social media platform X, formerly Twitter. This is a significant jump from the end of 2023, when FSD miles driven were less than 800 miles.
“Congratulations to the Tesla AI team!”, Musk wrote.
“It won’t be long before Tesla surpasses 10 billion miles of FSD,” the CEO said in a separate post.
The announcement comes just days after the company began taking steps to increase its FSD capture rate. Over this past weekend, Tesla began offering a free 30-day trial of its FSD to all customers in the United States who hadn’t purchased it. Musk also reportedly instructed staff to give buyers of new vehicles a short ride demonstrating the capabilities of Tesla’s real-time driver assistance features.
Because matter: These measures aim to increase buyers of the software which, according to the company, will enable fully autonomous driving in due course. Currently, however, it functions as a driver assistance system that requires active supervision of the driver.
The FSD “should really shine” by the end of April or May, Musk said in March. The software is trained on real-time driving data, making more miles on the road a necessity for software improvement.
In June 2023, the CEO considered vehicle autonomy to be the primary driver of the brand’s market value.
“The value of the company is based first and foremost on autonomy,” Musk later said at the VivaTech conference in Paris. “I think that’s really the main driver of our value.”
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