On November 6th local time, Tesla At Tesla's annual shareholder meeting, CEO Elon Musk announced that Tesla will support owners of vehicles with FSD (Full Self-Driving) functionality to text while driving within one or two months. He added that some drivers currently turn off FSD to text, which is "less safe."
However, texting while driving is illegal in most jurisdictions (including the United States). If caught, drivers face hefty fines and legal penalties. Musk has not explained how FSD will circumvent these legal risks.
If Tesla were to allow drivers to text while driving, When the FSD function is activated, the vehicle must be held accountable, which means that the previously promised "unsupervised FSD" function must be realized.
Musk has made promises about the "unsupervised full-slow drive" (FSD) feature every year for the past six years, but has repeatedly missed deadlines. Previously, Musk announced that the feature would be delivered to the market by the end of this year. However, at this shareholder meeting, Musk once again postponed the release of the "unsupervised FSD" feature to 2026.
In late October of this year, Tesla unveiled a technological innovation: a massive neural network system called "World Simulator." Tesla claims that this end-to-end neural network processes data equivalent to 500 years of human driving experience every day and continuously evolves itself in the virtual world.
However, unsupervised FSD functionality is not only limited by technological iterations, but also faces many regulatory challenges. Musk mentioned at the shareholder meeting that Tesla's FSD has only received "partial approval" in China, but is expected to receive full approval around February or March 2026.
Musk stated that Tesla "checks the data" before allowing owners to text while driving. At its shareholder meeting, Tesla released updated data to demonstrate the safety of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature. The data showed that with FSD enabled, Tesla vehicles experience only one collision every 4.92 million miles (approximately 7.92 million kilometers), while the average for vehicles in the United States is one collision every 700,000 miles (approximately 1.13 million kilometers). Based on this, Tesla stated that FSD reduces collisions by 85%.
However, some industry insiders have questioned the accuracy of the data. Below the aforementioned data, in small print, it states: "A collision is defined as any incident in which the airbags or other active restraint devices are triggered within 5 seconds of FSD being activated." This means that the data excludes Tesla's minor collisions.
Moreover, because the current FSD function is a supervised version, the above data cannot prove that FSD itself only causes one collision every 4.92 million miles, but rather that "human driver + FSD" driving together causes one collision every 4.92 million miles when airbags and other devices are triggered.
In addition, since FSD is mainly used on highways and Tesla users tend to be new car buyers and high-income groups, some analysts believe that this naturally determines that fewer collision accidents will occur.
In contrast, data from Tesla’s Robotaxi project in Austin shows that a collision occurs every 62,500 miles (about 100,000 kilometers), even with a safety supervisor in the vehicle.
(Article source: CBN)
