You know that old saying about how there are three sides to every story? Well, when it comes to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving rollout saga, opaque data sources seem to be the third belligerent in this ever-escalating war of numbers.
Yipit credit card data a measly 2% of Tesla owners converted from FSD trials to paid subscriptions, the firm’s numbers were swiftly called into question by none other than Elon himself, asserting “The take rate is much higher than 2%. Please.”
Speaking of advantage, Elon clearly still has supreme confidence in FSD’s ability to convert the remaining skeptics through sheer technological force. He revealed that FSD v12.4 of the autonomous driving software is imminent, landing an “internal release this weekend and limited external beta next week.”
The real fireworks promise to come later in the summer when FSD v12.5 arrives in late June packing what Elon cryptically described as “a major improvement in mpi and is single stack – no more implicit stack on highways.”
For the self-driving tech novices out there, that sounds an awful lot like Tesla finally ironing out its vehicle intelligence system to operate seamlessly regardless of road conditions or environment. A unified approach like that could go a long way towards quieting FSD’s loudest critics once and for all.
Then again, given the punishingly slow and scrutinized nature of deploying such disruptive autonomy software at scale, Elon could simply be overhyping his latest iterative update as per usual.
One thing’s for certain though – if v12.5 does live up to the hype and converts more of those oh-so elusive subscribers in droves, those pesky Tesla FSD subscriptions rate debates could finally be put to bed for good. For Tesla’s reputation and shareholders’ sake, here’s hoping the numbers start moving in a more favorable direction.