Tesla's FSD Set to Launch in China and Europe by 2025
2min read Recently, Tesla's AI team has released a product roadmap, which anticipates the launch of Full Self-Driving (FSD) in China and Europe in the first quarter of 2025, subject to regulatory approval.
Since 2016, Elon Musk has been exploring Tesla's FSD autonomous driving solution. In 2024, Tesla's FSD V12 was launched and widely rolled out in North America. The FSD V12 upgrade represents an end-to-end neural network for autonomous driving, from perception to vehicle control, with training compute power and data becoming the core barriers.
Currently, the FSD iteration is progressing steadily, with the latest 12.5.2 version parameters increased to five times that of version 12.4. It has integrated the highway and urban technology stacks, further enhancing driving smoothness. Specific improvements include more natural and earlier lane change decisions, driver monitoring using only the visual system, end-to-end driving on highways, and FSD functionality on the Cybertruck.
At the same time, Tesla continues to invest in the construction of AI supercomputing centers to meet the computing power needs for its autonomous driving training. As of 2Q24, Tesla's self-built supercomputing center's AI compute power exceeds 40,000 equivalent NVIDIA H100 GPUs and is expected to reach nearly 90,000 by the end of the year.
Musk previously estimated that Tesla's FSD testing mileage needs to reach 6 billion miles to meet the requirements of global regulatory agencies. According to Tesla's latest financial report, as of the end of Q2, FSD's cumulative driving mileage exceeds 1.6 billion miles. The company also stated that by the end of the year, FSD's unsupervised driving mileage will exceed that of human drivers, and it is confident in achieving unsupervised L5-level intelligent driving next year.
This year, Tesla has repeatedly lowered the price of FSD to attract users. China is an important market for Tesla vehicles, but the introduction of FSD has been repeatedly postponed.
The most recent instance was when Musk said during Tesla's earnings call in July that FSD is expected to enter China by the end of the year. FSD will be launched in China, Europe, and other countries after the release of version 12.6, with the unsupervised version expected to be commercially implemented in sync with Robotaxi.
At that time, he stated that the promotion of Tesla's autonomous driving technology in the United States and other regions would not encounter regulatory obstacles.
Although Tesla's FSD has not yet been rolled out in the Chinese market, it has been sold with the vehicle since the launch of the Model 3, and a subscription model may be introduced later.
Tesla FSD has evolved from the initial version to V12, with the main technological innovation being the reconstruction of the architecture—the introduction of end-to-end architecture. At the same time, the continuous iteration of Tesla's FSD system signifies that its autonomous driving technology is entering a rapidly developing period driven by data.
The advantages of Tesla FSD are reflected in: 1. Algorithms: It has achieved deep integration of machine learning throughout the entire autonomous driving process; 2. Perception: It can perform more driving actions that were previously difficult to complete, such as planning routes based on real-time road conditions rather than relying solely on maps; 3. Compute power: Tesla has greatly increased its investment in computing power, such as using thousands to tens of thousands of high-performance H100 GPUs. Tesla also plans to increase the number of GPUs on its basic training platform by two to three times, a move that will greatly enhance data processing capabilities and training.
Currently, Tesla FSD has implemented a series of promotional policies in the U.S. market. According to Tesla software tracking website TeslaFi, as of April 26, among the 19,759 Tesla vehicles registered by its paying users, 7,444 have installed the FSD V12 version, and 9,724 have installed the FSD V11 version. The most installed FSD V12.3.4 and FSD V11.4.9 versions have 6,149 and 9,381 installations, respectively, with a penetration rate of 31.1% and 47.5%.