Tesla “Full Self Driving” (FSD) — Licensing Strikeout, Patent Lawsuit

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A couple of completely different Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) tales have popped up this week. I figured I’d simply rapidly roll via a pair extra of them in a single article after masking the fairly attention-grabbing story from the Netherlands.

To start with, we’ve acquired Elon Musk completely flabbergasted, apparently, that different automakers haven’t been all for licensing “Full Self Driving” (FSD) from the corporate. Earlier at present, he wrote, “I’ve tried to warn them and even provided to license Tesla FSD, however they don’t need it! Loopy….”

Final yr and earlier within the yr, he indicated extra optimistically that some automakers have been within the licensing choice. Nonetheless, it seems that curiosity was overhyped, as a result of he has a special tune on the matter now. “When legacy auto does often attain out, they tepidly talk about implementing FSD for a tiny program in 5 years with unworkable necessities for Tesla, so pointless,” he added at present. That’s a special tune from April 2024 when he informed the funding group that one automaker was already in talks with Tesla over a possible deal, and saying in January 2025 that there was “important curiosity” in licensing the know-how. He additionally mentioned on that January investor name that, “I believe the curiosity degree from different producers to license FSD might be extraordinarily excessive as soon as it’s apparent that until you could have FSD, you’re useless.”

It’s an curiosity matter for a number of causes. For one, since Musk thinks FSD is the best factor since sliced bread, he believes will probably be so transformative that demand for Tesla autos will skyrocket and the corporate will turn out to be the largest automaker in historical past. Nonetheless, he additionally desires to license FSD to different automakers … which wouldn’t make Tesla autos so particular and would presumably damage the chance to realize this skyrocketing demand. I’m a little bit confused, however I assume Musk simply figures that Tesla might make extra income promoting FSD to different automakers than promoting an order of magnitude extra vehicles.

It’s additionally attention-grabbing as a result of Musk was so keen to do that practically two years in the past, and but it appears these different automakers have been proper to determine the know-how wasn’t absolutely ripe but. You continue to can’t use FSD with out being 100% in control of supervising it, and there hasn’t been important shopper demand for the characteristic consequently. Actually, whereas many automakers have seen their gross sales develop within the USTesla’s have declined. Maybe all of that adjustments in 2026 if FSD takes a big step ahead. We are going to see. Although, for now, reportedly, the very restricted FSD-powered robotaxi trials in Austin, Texas, have led to a number of crashes (even with paid human supervision) — so it seems the software program (if not {hardware}) might want to enhance significantly earlier than unsupervised FSD is prepared. Possibly it will be one other 5 years earlier than FSD can be helpful to different automakers, or possibly they’re far behind the curve and can remorse it, as Musk appears to suppose. Solely time will inform.

On a associated matter, Perrone Robotics has sued Tesla over what it claims are patent infringements. The corporate claims Tesla has dedicated infringements on 5 patents associated to robotics patents it has filed regarding self-driving autos. The violations return 6 years, in response to Perrone Robotics, and it’s additionally famous that the corporate tried to promote Tesla one of many patents in 2017. Naturally, we don’t have sufficient experience on the patents or Tesla FSD or the regulation to make any judgement on this. So, we are going to simply see if something important occurs with this lawsuit and maintain you up to date accordingly.