Tesla is adjusting its approach to driver supervision, making its Autopilot penalty system quicker to forgive infractions. According to Tesla’s owner’s manual for update 2025.32, the forgiveness period for each Autopilot or FSD strike has now been cut in half, reduced from a full seven days, down to just three and a half days.
In May 2024, Tesla updated its suspension system to forgive one strike per week of FSD use without receiving an additional strike. This was a drastic improvement from what Tesla had before, where they’d clear all strikes for everyone with every major FSD update.
Under the new policy, an Autopilot strike, issued for inattentiveness, will be removed from your record in just 3.5 days, provided no additional strikes are received during that period. You can still build up to, and have a maximum of five strikes (or three on vehicles without a cabin camera), at which point FSD will be locked out until the strikes reset.
The Balance of Safety and Convenience
The Autopilot strike system is a core part of Tesla’s strategy to ensure drivers are engaged and actively supervising the vehicle. Tesla’s vision-based driver monitoring system (DMS) was added back in 2021, and since then, Tesla has improved it several times, with the most recent removing the steering wheel nag and allowing users to go hands-free.
Tesla has also been balancing how much the driver can be distracted before the system warns them. Initially, the system was strict, and a single glance at the center screen would result in the vehicle warning you to pay attention. However, with FSD v13.2.9, Tesla began being more lenient, and future updates will be even less strict.
This policy change doesn’t alter that fundamental principle of supervision, and that drivers must be actively supervising the vehicle and ready to take over at a moment’s notice. While this is a practical benefit for users, it also raises an interesting question: why now?
FSD V14 & Reduced Monitoring
With the upcoming release of FSD V14, we’re also expecting a major reduction in driver monitoring, per statements Elon has made. Between the reduction in the grace period before a strike is removed and the DMS being less strict about monitoring, users are much less likely to strike out. It’d now require getting more than one strike per day to strike out and not be able to use FSD.
What Tesla is trying to do is reduce low-safety behaviors, such as when people turn off FSD to grab their phone and check a message, change a song, or change their destination, all things the system could issue a strike for. While this doesn’t change a driver’s unsafe behavior, it allows them to keep FSD while performing these actions, which is likely much safer than doing it while trying to drive manually.
Hardware 4 Only?
The reason for these changes may also lie in the increasing capability and maturity of FSD itself. This policy relaxation can be interpreted as a sign of Tesla’s growing confidence in how FSD handles itself on roads on a daily basis. As it becomes better at navigating complex scenarios and handling unexpected edge cases, the need for a long, punitive penalty becomes less necessary.
This raises the question: if Tesla is reducing driver monitoring due to FSD’s increased safety and capabilities, will the reduced driver monitoring be only for the more capable HW4 vehicles? Hardware 3 vehicles are still running FSD v12.6, while HW4 vehicles will soon be on FSD v14. While HW3 vehicles will be upgraded in the future and will eventually run FSD v14, that’s not expected until sometime late next year.
FSD is just as much of a safety system as it is a convenience feature for drivers. A more capable FSD is not just a chauffeur; it’s an ever-vigilant co-pilot that provides a powerful safety net. As that net becomes stronger and more reliable, it allows for a more nuanced and forgiving approach to driver supervision.
