All Teslas in the US get a one month trial of FSD starting this week
Prepare to get your minds blown, because Tesla has announced that every Tesla in the US will get a free trial of FSD for one month starting later this week.
Tesla is finally rolling out its FSD Beta v12 software, which CEO Elon Musk has referred to as “mind-blowing” – a term he has used for many other point releases of the software.
The update has been anticipated for a long time, but like many Tesla updates, it has been delayed several months.
FSD Beta v12 has significant back-end improvements to Tesla’s learning algorithm, which now takes advantage of “end-to-end neural nets.” This means that decisionmaking can be determined based on deep learning from Tesla’s massive amount of driving data, rather than having programmers code the logic themselves.
The system currently offers little true functional difference to how people use their cars, because it is officially a “Level 2” system, where the driver is still responsible for choices while the car is turned on. So you still have to pay attention to the road, even though Tesla has repeatedly said that the software will be capable of full level 5 “robotaxi”-style operation at some point in the future (with that future coming “this time next year,” for the last several years, according to CEO Musk).
FSD also costs a lot – $12k now, though it used to cost $15k – so a lot of owners don’t bother to buy it. In response to the extremely high price of FSD, Tesla also offers a subscription model, where you can try the system for $199/month.
But take rate has been relatively low. And so Tesla has occasionally offered temporary trials of FSD for certain customers. It once offered 3 months of FSD as an end-of-quarter sales incentive, and it also recently gave a 30-day trial of Enhanced Autopilot (but not FSD) for the holidays. You can also get three months of free FSD by using a current owner’s referral code when purchasing a vehicle.
But those promotions were apparently not enough, and Tesla seems like it won’t stop until everyone has had a chance to try its FSD software.
Earlier today, Musk told Tesla employees that they must start giving demo drives of FSD to every newly-delivered Tesla, something that will likely cause quite a backlog during Tesla’s traditional end-of-quarter delivery rush happening this week.
And then later today, Musk said that all owners will get temporary access to FSD, for one month, starting this week.
The idea for this promotion was floated last May, with Musk stating that Tesla would give a free month of FSD to everyone in North America as soon as it is “super smooth.”
Apparently the system now crosses that bar – or, well, maybe not quite, since it seems that we have backtracked to everyone in the US, rather than everyone in North America. Sorry, Canada and Mexico.
Another open question (sort of – we’re betting the answer is no) is whether or not cars with previous hardware revisions will get this update.
Tesla has said that every car since October 2016 has full self-driving hardware built in, but it turns out that the hardware at the time actually did not have enough computing power to handle FSD tasks and needed to be upgraded. Owners who purchased FSD got a free upgrade to the new hardware, but when the subscription service came out, Tesla started charging owners $1,500 (later lowered to $1,000) for hardware they already bought.
So these cars are “capable of FSD,” at least if Tesla’s 2016 blog post is to be believed, and given the knowledge that the purchasers had when they bought it. However, we’re guessing Tesla will not offer hardware upgrades to these owners, despite that they were told when they purchased the car that they had all the hardware for FSD.
Although if you really wanted it, you could probably sue to get a free upgrade, like one owner successfully did.
Electrek’s Take
We haven’t tried v12 yet, but we’ve been promised several times to have our “minds blown” by FSD updates, and alas, our minds are still well contained within their respective headcases.
The system does seem to be improving, but improvements have been quite gradual over time. Even for those of us who don’t use it very often (I mainly drive a Roadster), going a year or two between FSD activations, I haven’t noticed any particularly huge improvements in the system’s driving capabilities.
What actually did blow my mind were my rides in Mercedes’ Level 3 DRIVE PILOT system and Waymo’s Level 4 autonomous taxi. Those are systems where the car can actually take control of the vehicle under certain circumstances, and you actually don’t have to drive it. As-is, FSD does not do that, so any improvement is just a better driver’s aid, not an actual full self-driving system
Until FSD actually gets closer to its promise of full autonomy – namely, making the step change from level 2 to level 3, where the car is actually responsible for the driving task in some circumstances – all of these demos and “mind-blowing” updates seem more like a novelty to me.
And in particular, as I’ve said above in this article and many times before, if Tesla is going to give this upgrade to “all US cars that are capable of FSD,” it needs to upgrade the computers on the cars that it sold as capable of FSD, and it needs to do it for free. Those owners bought that hardware, and Tesla needs to give it to them.
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EV sales kept up their momentum in December 2024, with incentives playing a big role, according to the latest Cox Automotive’s Kelley Blue Book report.
December’s strong EV sales saw an average transaction price (ATP) of $55,544, which helped push the industry-wide ATP higher, according to Kelley Blue Book. The December ATP for an EV was higher year-over-year by 0.8%, slightly below the industry average, and higher month-over-month by 1.1%. Tesla ATPs were higher year-over-year by 10.5%.
Incentives for EVs remained elevated in December, although they were slightly lower month-over-month at 14.3% of ATP, down from 14.7% in November.
EV incentives were higher by an impressive 41% year-over-year and have been above 12% of ATP for six consecutive months. Strong sales incentives, which averaged more than $6,700 per sale in 2024, were one reason EV sales surpassed 1.3 million units last year, according to Cox Automotive, a new record for volume and share.
(My colleague Jameson Dow reported yesterday, “In 2024, the world sold 3.5 million more EVs than it did in the previous year … This increase is larger than the 3.2 million increase in EV sales from the previous year – meaning that EV sales aren’t just up, but that the rate of growth is itself increasing.”)
Kelley Blue Book estimated that in December, approximately 84,000 vehicles – or 5.6% of total sales – transacted at prices higher than $80,000 – the highest volume ever. KBB lumps gas cars and EVs together into this luxury vehicle category, so this is where Tesla Cybertruck is slotted.
However, Tesla bundles sales figures of Cybertruck with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi(!) into a category it calls “other models,” so we don’t know for sure exactly how many Cybertrucks Tesla sold in Q4, much less in December. However, Electrek‘s Fred Lambert estimates between 9,000 and 12,000 Cybertrucks were sold in Q4, and that’s not a stellar sales figure.
What will January bring when it comes to EV ATPs? What about tax credits? Check back in a month and I’ll fill you in.
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Tesla is now claiming that Cybertruck was the ‘best-selling electric pickup in US’ last year despite not even reporting the number of deliveries.
There’s a lot of context needed here.
As we often highlighted, Tesla is sadly one of, if not the most, opaque automakers regarding sales reports.
Tesla doesn’t break down sales per model or even region.
For comparison, here’s Ford’s Q4 2024 sales report compared to Tesla’s:
You could argue that Tesla has fewer models than Ford, and that’s true, but Tesla’s report literally has two lines despite having six different models.
There’s no reason not to offer a complete breakdown like all other automakers other than trying to make it hard to verify the health of each vehicle program.
This has been the case with the Cybertruck. Tesla is bundling its Cybertruck deliveries with Model S, Model X, and Tesla Semi deliveries.
Despite this lack of disclosure, Tesla has been able to claim that the Cybertruck has become “the best-selling electric pickup truck” in the US in 2024:
It very well might be true. Ford disclosed 33,510 F-150 Lightning truck deliveries in the US in 2024 while most estimates are putting Cybertruck deliveries at around 40,000 units.
Those are global deliveries, but Tesla only delivered the Cybertruck in the US, Canada, and Mexico in 2024, and most of the deliveries are believed to be in the US.
However, there’s essential context needed here, as we highlighted in our recent ‘Tesla Cybertruck sales are disastrous‘ article.
First off, Tesla had a backlog of over 1 million reservations for the Cybertruck that it has been building since 2019. This led many to believe Tesla already had years of demand baked in for the truck and that production would be the constraint.
However, based on estimates, again, because Tesla refuses to disclose the data, Cybertruck deliveries were either flat or down in Q4 versus Q3 despite Tesla introducing cheaper versions of the vehicle and ramping up production.
Again, that’s after just about 40,000 deliveries.
Furthermore, with almost 11,000 deliveries in Q4 in the US, Ford more likely than not outsold Cybertruck with the F-150 Lightning in Q4.
Electrek’s Take
Tesla is in damage control here. There’s no doubt that it is having issues selling the Cybertruck.
Inventory is full of Cybertrucks and Tesla is now discounting them and offering free lifetime Supercharging.
Tesla is great at ramping up production, and it’s clear the Cybertruck is not production-constrained anymore. It is demand-constrained despite having over 1 million reservations.
Again, those reservations were made before Tesla unveiled the production version, which happened to have less range and cost significantly more.
The upcoming cheaper single motor version should help with demand, but I have serious doubts Tesla can ramp this program up to more than 100,000 units in the US.
As a reminder, Tesla installed a production capacity of 250,000 units annually and Musk said he could see Tesla selling 500,000 Cybertrucks per year.
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