Over the years Tesla’s full self-driving beta is being praised for its improvements. The FSD Beta is being used by many people on roads and has always been experimented with by regular Tesla owners apart from the company testing. However, in a recent finding by Taylor Ogan, it is seen that the Tesla FSD Beta data is actually behind. Compared to other autonomous software in the market, Tesla is barely on the charts.
It is first posted by Electrek, saying the Full Self-Driving Beta Data is “awful”. To be clear, the Tesla Full Self-Driving Beta data in this article is very minimal, and therefore, it could not be fully representative of the actual capacity. But that’s the point of the article. It’s unfortunately the best data available because Tesla has gone out of its way to not release disengagement data that other companies developing self-driving systems are making available. A disengagement consists of the system disengaging whether by itself or by the driver in order to either avoid danger or comply with the rules of the road. Miles between disengagement have been useful data to track the progress of self-driving programs. It’s not a perfect metric to track progress, but it’s one of the only ones we have right now and we should see improvements in it over time with more miles between disengagement or driver intervention.
The data
While Tesla doesn’t release the data, a group of Tesla FSD Beta testers has been self-reporting data for a while now, and Taylor Ogan of Snow Bull Capital has tracked it to see the progress. According to the data, miles driven per disengagement have gone down by 54% since March, and it currently sits around the same level it was around this time last year.
In March, I tweeted this thread putting Tesla's FSD beta disengagement rates into perspective. You could barely see Tesla on the charts.
Okay, so Tesla was nowhere close to the big boys nine months ago, but has it improved since?https://t.co/wB6DJym90k pic.twitter.com/LVKmWyCVIT
— Taylor Ogan (@TaylorOgan) December 13, 2022
Based on this again limited set of data, Tesla FSD Beta can only drive a few miles between disengagement, while other self-driving programs, like Waymo and Cruise, are reporting tens of thousands of miles between disengagement on average. These results are disappointing, as they point to very little to no progress in the FSD Beta program over the last year, at least based on this metric.
The data has been used to help gain confidence in these systems, some of which are already deployed commercially in California and Arizona. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly told people to “try FSD Beta for themselves” in order to gauge its progress. As if anecdotal evidence would be better at tracking progress than hard data on miles per disengagement.