Tesla tests FSD v13 for imminent release with free trial as China delays approval

While Elon Musk himself admitted that he tends to be optimistic with release timelines when talking about the Robotaxi, Tesla's AI team has been nothing but consistent when it comes to its driver-assist features roadmap.

After promising and delivering FSD for the Cybertruck, as well as bringing v12.5 to older Teslas with HW3 kits in September, its release timeline for October is no less ambitious. The October roadmap entry that raised some eyebrows last month was FSD v13. Tesla had barely rolled out FSD 12.5 at the time, and for HW4 vehicles only, let alone such a big version jump in the span of a month or so.

It turns out that FSD 13 is very real, and its release for the general Tesla driving public is actually going to happen soon. That is what the former Tesla Autopilot Director Ashok Elluswamy who was just promoted to VP of AI Software now says. 

While talking about the flawless autonomous driving performance of the Robotaxi during its announcement event, he basically disclosed that Tesla's cheapest car was riding on FSD 13. "The best part was that almost all the autonomy demonstrated was using close to the production AI software or will ship soon in v13," says Ashok, hinting that the FSD 13 release might be right around the corner before the end of the month, just as promised.

That the promise had something to do with the Robotaxi unveil was the initial guess of many analysts when they heard that Tesla plans to launch FSD 13 in October. The Robotaxi is purpose built for a driverless experience and will be equipped with Tesla's latest AI5 driver-assist hardware, so it makes sense that it is the vehicle anointed with FSD 13 first.

As to what will the FSD 13 release bring to other Tesla vehicles, remains to be seen, but it might flesh out the unsupervised FSD option that Tesla plans to launch in limited areas next year, as well as the Cybercab ride-share service that regular Model Y and Model 3 owners could take part in as well.

In any case, Tesla apparently has big plans for the demonstration of the FSD 13 abilities, as it just brought back the free FSD trial that it offered last quarter. Eligible owners have started getting notices that they can test drive FSD for free for a whole month before they take a purchase or subscription decision.

If they go the purchase route, they can now get a 0% APR financing rate on a Model Y or Model 3, as well as free FSD transfer, in a further push to increase uptake in the US as Tesla prepares to battler regulators for unsupervised FSD approval.

When it comes to FSD's global release, however, Tesla is hitting some snags, as Chinese media is now reporting that the local release of its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) feature is nowhere near approval. In fact, even the already delayed FSD China release timeframe that was moved from Q4 to Q1, may now happen even later than that.

"The rollout progress is not expected to mirror the speed that the company itself planned," tip insiders, so Tesla will have to sit and watch while self-driving systems of local rivals like Xpeng are already taking over major cities in China, all the while it is only running limited pilot trials.

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