Tesla's self-driving may work only in conditions it handles well

Tesla owners may get a car that drives itself without supervision next year, but only in certain places. On Wednesday's earnings call, a Tesla AI executive said the feature is not meant for long road trips at first. It will work inside the zones where Tesla's Robotaxi service already operates.

What changed

Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla's VP of AI, said unsupervised Full Self-Driving is coming "somewhere around Q2 next year" for privately owned Teslas. It would arrive with FSD V15, the next version of the software. Unsupervised means the driver would not have to watch the road. Today's version still needs a person paying attention.

Where it would work

The catch is the map. Tesla's Robotaxi service runs in parts of seven metro regions:

• Austin
• Dallas
• Houston
• Miami
• Orlando, Tampa, and the San Francisco Bay Area

In the Bay Area, every Tesla robotaxi is supervised by a human operator. In Austin, the zone covers about 260 square miles of the city and leaves out high-speed roadways. That is a small fraction of the roads Teslas drive on across the US.

What a geofence is

These zones are called geofences. A geofence is a digital boundary on a map. The car's self-driving feature works inside it and not outside it. Elluswamy said the only added requirement is that customer cars can be part of the geofences and the fleet management Tesla uses for its robotaxis.

Tesla is not alone in this approach. Tensor, a San Jose automaker, plans a luxury sedan it says can drive itself. The company told Business Insider that the feature will work only inside restricted geofences too.

What is not known

Tesla did not say why it is starting with geofences. The report suggests liability is one likely reason. If a company says you can take your eyes off the road, it may be responsible when something goes wrong. The material does not say how the zones might grow, or whether weather or time of day will matter.

What to do

Anyone who owns or plans to buy a Tesla should treat the Q2 date as a goal, not a promise. The reporter who wrote the story had hoped to sleep through a 400-mile drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles. That is not what this first release describes. Check whether your regular routes fall inside a Robotaxi zone before counting on it.