Elon Musk recently clarified the process of becoming a Full Self Driving beta tester. At midnight, Friday, October 15th, Tesla is planning to recruit 1,000 drivers a day into the beta tester program. He's not going to pay us. Why should he? So many of us are perfectly willing to do it for free. Just keep in mind, even though this is volunteer work, you don't get to take a tax deduction for your mileage because Tesla isn't a 501c3 tax-exempt organization.
There are probably a million Teslas on the road in the US according to Good Car, Bad Car.
According to a survey in Electrek, around 21% of Teslas have FSD.
That leaves around 210,000 Teslas that are eligible. Of those, we can guess that probably half of them are driven by people who may not be aware of the FSD Beta or are not interested in testing it. So I estimate that only 105,000 people pushed the button. I suspect that the actual number is way less than that.
So now, let's think about the scoring system. Elon has said that you'd likely require a score of 100 to get the beta in the first few days, and that Tesla would slowly lower the score required from there.
He probably has a floor value, a score that's too low to get into the program. The driving scores are probably distributed in a normal bell-shaped distribution curve just like heights, weights, and IQ levels. Elon will want to recruit only the safest drivers, which could mean that they're looking at drivers who are above the mean. Those are the people he can depend on to WATCH THE FURSHLUGGINER ROAD and not crash into stopped emergency vehicles.
So, of the 105,000 people who pushed the button, only around half will be above the mean. That's around 52,500 people. Elon plans to onboard 1,000 people a day. So, if Tesla continues adding 1,000 drivers a day and your score is in the top half, you can count on getting the software within eight weeks of the start of the onboarding process.
Of course, it's no guarantee that Tesla will continue to release the beta at the rate of 1,000/day. They may open it up sooner if everything is going well or even slow it down if they need additional time to fix issues, but eventually everyone who paid for it will get it.
