This isn't accurate. There's an option to purchase the FSD package upfront or pay a monthly subscription (just a couple of taps on the phone app).

Either option enables Enhanced Autopilot with summon mode, automatic lane changes (configurable), navigation on autopilot (i.e. autopilot on interstates that can handle entrance and exit ramps).

If you've paid upfront, or have a subscription, you can now request access to the FSD Beta by tapping a button on the car's display.

Once agreeing to the conditions, your driving will be monitored and measured based on various characteristics. After each trip, a detailed safety score is shown on the mobile app, with a breakdown for that particular trip and a cumulative score. This includes detailed charts and metrics for each category. The process is transparent and well-documented, along with the math involved [0]. It even includes a simulator to see how changes to your driving would affect the score. It's honestly pretty impressive and highly polished; even the graphs are interactive. Like any metric, it's not flawless, but it serves its purpose.

Only after driving for an extended period while maintaining a safety score of 99 or 100, you'll eventually have an option to activate the FSD Beta.

The driver monitoring is quite sophisticated now. It's made abundantly clear that after 3 violations (or maybe 5 now), FSD Beta access will be revoked. Even picking up your phone with one hand to use it briefly will be detected by the in-cabin camera, and an alert will appear to pay attention.

As someone who participates in the FSD Beta, the barrier to entry is high. And the people testing it are likely to be the safest and most attentive drivers on the road. I keep both hands on the wheel, and I'm ready to take over at any moment.

Based on my anecdotal observations of how people behave on the road, I'd wager 95% of people would struggle with the safety rating :-). You'll find humorous YouTube videos of people being shocked by how low their score is--only after having watched them drive like an NYC cab driver!

Not to mention the built-in safety features make other cars seem primitive by comparison. For example, just recently, there was a cyclist far ahead who was behaving erratically, driving on and off the median, grass, and road. The car identifies a person on a bicycle (shown on the screen), analyzes the trajectory, and presents a series of audible beeps _well_ in advance to alert the driver. That's just one example of many.

The FSD Beta is updated approximately every two weeks, with extremely detailed release notes with lots of machine learning goodness [1]. Examples:

- Upgraded modeling of lane geometry from dense rasters ("bag of points") to an autoregressive decoder that directly predicts and connects "vector space" lanes point by point using a transformer neural network. This enables us to predict crossing lanes, allows computationally cheaper and less error prone post-processing, and paves the way for predicting many other signals and their relationships jointly and end-to-end.

- Improved the precision of VRU detections by 44.9%, dramatically reducing spurious false positive pedestrians and bicycles (especially around tar seams, skid marks, and rain drops). This was accomplished by increasing the data size of the next-gen autolabeler, training network parameters that were previously frozen, and modifying the network loss functions. We find that this decreases the incidence of VRU-related false slowdowns.

- Reduced the predicted velocity error of very close-by motorcycles, scooters, wheelchairs, and pedestrians by 63.6%. To do this, we introduced a new dataset of simulated adversarial high speed VRU interactions. This update improves autopilot control around fast-moving and cutting-in VRUs.

[0] https://www.tesla.com/support/safety-score

[1] https://www.notateslaapp.com/news/721/fsd-beta-10-11-now-goi...