San Francisco: Nearly a year after Tesla started testing its controversial “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) beta software with a select group of customers, the company’s CEO Elon Musk said he is aiming for a wider release by the end of September.
According to The Verge, the news comes as an older version of the software leaked online.
Musk said on Twitter that the company would begin rolling out FSD version 10 to customers in its early access programme at midnight on September 10. Then, the software “will need another few weeks after that for tuning (and) bug fixes,” which Musk estimated would take four weeks.
At that point, a “public beta button” will be made available to more Tesla customers, which is expected to take the form of a download button for people who purchased the FSD package.
Musk has been promising a wider release of the beta software for those customers who purchased the FSD package (which currently costs $10,000) for a while now. It’s possible that Tesla will blow past this deadline and Musk will tweet a new date to get customers excited, the report said.
In 2018, Musk said that the “long awaited” version of FSD would begin rolling out in August of that year, which didn’t happen.
He did it again in 2019, proclaiming that “a year from now” there would be “over a million cars with full self-driving, software, everything.” That also didn’t happen.
The company actually began shipping FSD version 9 in July, but only to members of its early access programme.
Meanwhile, Tesla is expected to launch cars in the Indian market soon as its four models have received approval for homologation as seen on the government’s Vahan Sewa portal.
“Tesla has completed homologation and received approval for four of its vehicle variants in India,” a Tesla Club India tweeted recently.
“While we don’t have any confirmation on names yet, these are probably Model 3 and Y variants,” it added.