Tesla is approaching a critical milestone in its autonomous driving development, with the latest Full Self-Driving software showing the largest performance improvement in four years of data collection, according to Piper Sandler.
Analyst Alexander Potter reiterated an Overweight rating and $500 price target on the stock in a research note published Tuesday first obtained by PriceTarget.
The target implies 13.7% upside from Monday’s closing price and would represent a new all time for the stock.
In the note titled “TSLA is Getting Very Close to Unsupervised FSD,” Potter highlighted data from a community-run tracker that monitors the software’s real-world performance.
“On Friday we hosted a discussion with the designer of the FSD Community Tracker, which is a website that gauges the efficacy of Tesla’s full self-driving (FSD) software,” Potter wrote.
The tracker’s core metric, referred to as “miles to critical disengagement,” exhibited a greater than 20-fold improvement after FSD version 14.1 was released in October, the analyst said.
A critical disengagement is defined as a situation where human intervention is necessary to prevent an unsafe outcome.
“[It improved] from 441 miles in the previous version to 9,200+ miles. This was the biggest sequential improvement in four years of data collection,” Potter wrote.
On Monday, a Tesla owner shared driving statistics showing that after navigating 78 destinations, he accumulated 3,000.2 miles using FSD version 14.2.1 with no interventions required.
Approximately 10% of the driving was in city environments, with the remaining 90% on highways.
“From Raleigh, NC to Miami, FL to Atlanta, GA to Houston, TX & more my 2025 Model 3 LR RWD truly did not need any supervision & I could have easily been asleep in the backseat,” X user David Moss wrote.
“Unbelievably wild & fascinating times we live in!” Moss added.
European Expansion
The research note comes as Tesla expands its Full Self-Driving test ride program in Europe.
The company said Tuesday it is adding Denmark and Switzerland to the program, following its initial launch in Germany, France and Italy.
The expansion comes one week after Tesla extended the test rides through the end of March due to strong customer interest.
