In about seven months Tesla will Start region by region deployment of unsupervised TESLA FSD for Customer Usage. The owners of FSD will start to get unsupervised FSD. This will be before extreme (aka material) scaling of unsupervised robotaxi. Getting beyond 20,000 to 60,000 unsupervised robotaxi will be a few months after FSD 15 is released, which could be Q4 2026 or Q1 2027. There will be a series of substantially improved FSD models.
The reasoning enhancements are less for the improved safety although that will matter. It will be for the reasoning so that FSD does not get confused and block traffic. Blocking traffic with robotaxi even with remote human driver support still limits Waymo’s deployment to a few thousand vehicles. This risk of robotaxi traffic jams would limit Tesla robotaxi to about 100 per city and would limit usage by time of day and traffic levels.
Current FSD subscription revenue is for 510,000 subscriptions. 1.28 million active FSD but 770,000 were one time sales.
510,000 at ~$1,000/year average = $0.5 billion in annual recurring revenue.
$4-5 billion in one time FSD sales revenue.
180,000 FSD sales and subscriptions were added.
FSD and TESLA ROBOTAXI safety are already at average human driver safety levels. There are improvements in existing or planned versions for 2026 to roughly double or triple safety.
What is left is FSD always making the good choices to prevent traffic chaos.
2000 Waymos and previously Cruise have caused traffic chaos in the SF Bay Area and elsewhere.
How good the FSD and robotaxi are at making good intersection choices and avoiding any unneeded indecision determines how many Tesla robotaxi cars can be in a city.
This is not a minor problem for customer owned and driven Tesla. If we are driving our Tesla then we can easily see the mostly safe but annoying situation where it safely stopped but indecisive.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Can you please analyze the cost to retrofit existing HW3 cars with HW4 or better?
While FSD is good, it’s not quite there yet for fully unsupervised. Tesla severely missed your 2025 prediction for mass scaling of unsupervised FSD and may or not make it this year either.