Tesla starts judging owners it charged $10,000 for self-driving

The wait is almost over for some Tesla customers to get access to driver-assistance technology the company has marketed in controversial ways — as long as they’re on their best behaviour.

Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has said that on Friday, the electric-car maker will roll out an updated version of its Full Self-Driving beta software, which until now has only been available to roughly 2,000 people.

Those with access to this ever-updating software —a mix of Tesla employees and fervent Musk fans — have for almost a year been honing a system the company has charged as much as $10,000 for customers to use sometime in the future. Tesla says the system, often referred to as FSD, is designed to someday handle both short- and long-distance trips without driver intervention.

It’s unclear how broad the wider release will be because of a curve ball Musk threw earlier this month. The CEO tweeted that the download button customers will see Friday will request car owners’ permission for Tesla to assess their driving behaviour for seven days. If the company deems the behavior good, it will grant access to FSD beta.

The expanded access and surprise condition are the latest twist and turn involving FSD and Autopilot, the driver-assistance system that’s divided Tesla watchers for years. Musk’s fostering of the perception Tesla is a self-driving leader has helped make it the world’s most valuable automaker by far. But others have taken issue with what they see as a reckless and misleading approach to deploying technology that isn’t ready. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration recently opened its second defect investigation into Autopilot since 2016.

“This is another example of Tesla marching to its own drum. It’s like, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead,” Gene Munster, a co-founder of investing firm Loup Ventures, said by phone. “Setting aside some of the regulatory concerns and pushback, Tesla is determined to move forward on its own agenda.”

NHTSA started probing Autopilot in August after almost a dozen collisions at crash scenes involving first-responder vehicles. The regulator — which has the authority to deem cars defective and order recalls — is assessing the technologies and methods Tesla uses to monitor, assist and enforce drivers’ engagement when using Autopilot. It’s also looking into the system’s detection of objects and events on the road, and how it responds.

Musk first announced his plan to sell FSD in October 2016, a few months after he told a tech conference he considered autonomous driving to be “basically a solved problem.”