For the first time, after over a decade, Tesla appears ready to remove the Beta safety blanket from its core Autopilot features.
According to some deep digging into the 2025.38 software update by Tesla hacker Greentheonly, Tesla appears to be preparing to strip the Beta designation from Autosteer.
While Tesla has changed some of the safety nomenclature around FSD, the removal of the beta designation from Autosteer suggests that Tesla finally considers the basic software stack for Autopilot to be mature enough to be a standard, commercial-grade product.
Tesla has not removed the warning that appears on-screen when Autosteer is chosen from the Autopilot screen fir the first time, reminding users that the product requires supervision.
Smarter Nags
Alongside the removal of Beta from Autopilot, Tesla is also preparing to introduce a more intelligent driver monitoring system, likely to enable text-and-drive capabilities in the near future. The icons found by Green suggest three different severities of attention nags in the future, likely triggered dynamically based on the vehicle’s driving confidence.
High Confidence: White head symbol, white eyes
Medium Confidence: White head symbol, red eyes
Low Confidence: Red head symbol, red eyes
This means that Tesla is building the ability to take your eyes off the road based on just how confident your vehicle feels about driving in the current situation. At a high confidence level, you’ll likely only be required to glance at the road occasionally. As the confidence level lowers, you’ll need to be be more attentive, and then with the lowest confidence, full eyes need to be on the road prepared to take over.
Geofenced FSD
Green also discovered a new warning message in the code, "Approaching a country border, FSD features might become unavailable."
This is likely a clue for potential FSD rollouts in Europe. As we recently heard, Tesla is looking to release FSD in the Netherlands in February 2026, with other parts of the EU hopefully to follow.
This means that FSD may be legal in a particular country, but if the vehicle crosses a border, then features may be reduced automatically based on the availability of features in that country.
This is similar to how FSD would automatically be locked out after a vehicle passed the US-Mexico border, before Tesla introduced FSD in Mexico earlier this year. This geofenced compliance will enable Tesla to activate FSD in friendly jurisdictions immediately, without waiting for unanimous EU-wide approval.
