Tesla’s advanced driver-assist system (ADAS), marketed as Full Self-Driving (FSD – Supervised), has reached a major milestone this year, clocking over 8 billion cumulative miles. The milestone brings us closer to Elon Musk’s prediction that training data from 10 billion miles of FSD would help achieve unsupervised driving at scale.
Musk’s promise of a completely autonomous self-driving car dates back over a decade, when, in 2013, he promised that Tesla cars would reach autonomous driving (SAE Level 5) within 1-3 years.
Back then, Musk and Tesla referred to the feature as Autopilot, but after six years, they adopted the term Full Self-Driving (FSD) instead, along with a few additional advanced features.
Over the years, FSD has undergone nomenclature changes, with the latest noting that the system must be supervised at all times.
What can FSD do?
According to the Tesla website, the Full Self Driving (Supervised) system can complete driving maneuvers such as lane changes, route navigation, steering as well as parking the car under driver supervision.
Using the Smart Summon feature on the Tesla app, one can even ask the vehicle to navigate through a parking lot and reach the owner in front of a supermarket or building. Tesla has also demonstrated how the system can perform autonomous car deliveries.
At the core of FSD is Tesla’s approach to autonomous driving, which uses visible-light cameras and coarse-grained two-dimensional maps for navigation. This approach differs from that of Waymo and Cruise, which use lidar and three-dimensional maps to improve navigation accuracy.
To achieve its ultimate aim of reaching Level 5 autonomy, Tesla is relying on cumulative miles driven with its FSD to train the system.
8 billion miles and counting
The FSD webpage on the Tesla website shows a live counter of the software’s cumulative miles. Tesla watcher Sawyer Merritt highlighted on X (formerly Twitter) that five years ago, the number of cumulative miles stood at just 6 million.
In the next two years, the number increased 100X, reaching 670 million by 2023. However, the increasing number of Tesla vehicles on the road took the cumulative miles to 2.25 billion in the very next year.
Tesla’s strategy to offer free trials from time to time and, more recently, its own fleet of Robotaxis has helped the company reach new heights. In the first 50 days of 2026 alone, Tesla owners logged a billion miles, bringing the total past the 8 billion-mile mark.
While the milestone is remarkable, it also underscores Musk’s prediction that 10 billion miles of training data would help deploy autonomous driving at scale. At the current rate, Tesla’s fleet is on track to reach this target this year.
It will be interesting to see the explanation Musk offers as to why the FSD is still at Level 2, even as he has spent the last decade promising an entirely autonomous future with this technology.
Of course, while Musk might say the technology is Level 5-ready, approvals for autonomous driving in the US are granted by the state, and only 22 states have passed legislation authorizing their operation.
Unless that changes, an autonomously driven car could be unlawful once it crosses a state border.
