Elon Musk discusses Tesla FSD rollout challenges for Europe and China

It is no secret that Tesla’s future relies largely on the company’s ability to achieve true autonomous driving through its Full Self-Driving (FSD) program.

However, while FSD is making huge headways in North America, the program has yet to be rolled out in key markets such as Europe and China.

FSD milestones:

• Tesla has been initiating a continued push to roll out improvements to FSD, with recent v13 releases getting positive reviews from users.
• As hinted at by Tesla’s Q4 2024 Update Letter, FSD users have likely passed 3 billion cumulative miles since the program was launched in October 2020.
• Prior to the Q4 2024 earnings call, Tesla posted a video demonstrating Unsupervised FSD in action at the Fremont Factory.
• Elon Musk also reiterated during the recent earnings call that customers who bought FSD with their HW3 vehicles will get an AI4 hardware upgrade for free.

Europe challenges:

• While FSD is already training very well in North America, Elon Musk noted during the Q4 2024 earnings call that there are challenges to rolling out the system in Europe.
• In Europe, Musk noted that tons of regulations and bureaucracy make it difficult to roll out FSD in the region.
• “Europe is a layer cake of regulations of bureaucracy, that really needs to be addressed. This is like America innovates, Europe regulates. So, guys, there’s too many reps in the field. For example, for us, just to release supervised full self-driving in Europe, even though it works really well, we have to go through a mountain of paperwork with the Netherlands, which is our primary regulatory authority.
• “Then the Netherlands presents this to the EU in, I think, May. And there’s like this big EU country committee. We expect it to be approved at that time. There’s nothing we can do to make that happen sooner.
• “In fact, nobody seems to do — but I guess all the countries would have to somehow vote in some way to have it happen sooner than May. Otherwise, it wouldn’t happen sooner than May. So, when is unsupervised FSD a lot in Europe? I’m like May next year, maybe? I don’t know. Sometimes it’s a 12-month cadence, sometimes it’s six-month cadence,” Musk said.

China challenges:

• It’s not just Europe that is proving challenging. As per Musk, even China has some challenges when it comes to the rollout of FSD.
• “Then China, which is a gigantic market, we do have some challenges because they weren’t — they currently don’t allow us to transfer training video outside of China. And then the US government won’t let us do training in China. So, we’re in a bit of a bind there. It’s like a quandary.
• “So, we’re resolving that by literally looking at videos of streets in China that are available on the internet to understand and then feeding that into our video training so that publicly available video of street signs and traffic rules in China can be used for training and then also putting it in a very accurate simulator. And so, it will train using sim for bus lanes in China. Like bus lanes in China are one of our biggest challenges in making FSD work in China. Their bus lanes are very complicated. And there’s like literally like hours of the day that you’re allowed to be there and not be there.
• “And then if you accidently go in at bus lane at the wrong time, you get an automatic ticket instantly. And so, it was kind of a big deal, bus lanes in China. So, we put that into our simulator train on that, the car has to know what time of day it is, read the sign. Anyway, we’ll get this solved,” Musk said.

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