Tesla needs more Full Self Driving data and is offering discounted car insurance for it
Tesla needs more Full Self Driving data and is offering discounted car insurance for it
Wary of Tesla's unfinished, still-in-beta-form Full Self Driving automated driving software? We are too, not least because this feature isn't ready for prime time. We have the hands-free driving assistant installed on our Model Y long-term test car, and it's hardly confidence inspiring, and third-party evaluators have reached similar conclusions. It's also expensive, costing either several thousand dollars up front or $99 per month to use on a subscription basis.
Tesla, however, relies on users experimenting with — we mean, using — FSD to collect real-world data that it says helps shape the software for the better. Never mind that other automakers gather this sort of data in testing conditions, with the oversight of company engineers and coders — not just regular people playing with a risky, unfinished feature on actual roads. In need of more users for that precious data stream, Tesla has come up with a discount to encourage more FSD use that's tied to the company's in-house insurance offering.
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Tesla Insurance is available to Tesla owners, provided by Tesla, and owners can now see a discount on their premiums if they up their usage of FSD. The numbers are a little fuzzy, though. Tesla says it'll cut 10 percent off users' premium costs, provided they use FSD for more than 50 percent of all their driving (as measured by total miles driven per month, compared to miles driven that same month using FSD). Dive deeper into the fine print and it seems that the 10 percent discount isn't a blanket, across-the-premium haircut — it only applies to "certain eligible coverages and not to your total insurance policy premium." Users also can't realize the discounts if they're running a trial version of Full Self Driving — you gotta pony up for the full subscription cost or have the software activated up front. The discounts also are only available to owners in Texas and Arizona.
In case you missed it: Elon Musk says Tesla aims to introduce a $25,000 model in 2025
Sounds great, provided you can eat the cost of the non-trial FSD feature. But it also is highly counterintuitive on a common-sense scale: Though Tesla insists FSD is safer than human drivers, as we've found with our Model Y and other Teslas we've tested with FSD, the system makes mind-boggling and potentially devastating mistakes. (We pay close attention when testing FSD, always ready to retake control should the car decide to do something bizarre or unsafe, like driving down the wrong side of an unmarked dirt road or suddenly cutting off other traffic, but some users might not be as fastidious.) In brief, using FSD often (certainly more than 50 percent of the time) seems, based on our experience, to be an imprudent choice.
But if you zoom out and look at what Tesla's really doing with FSD — essentially, testing a feature on public roads using, well, the public — the Tesla Insurance discounts read a little differently. Though we don't think anyone should be using FSD more often in its current form, the insurance cut for owners is a cost increase for Tesla. In other words, it shows Tesla putting more of its skin in the FSD testing game, by taking on (at least in part) the potential liabilities of greater FSD use.
So, whether you see it as an incentive to get owners using FSD more, or more responsibility for that FSD use shifting to Tesla's balance sheet, in reality it's a little of both.
Photos by MotorTrend
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