June 1, 2026 - Tesla Ditches FSD Branding In China

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily for June 1, 2026, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, Vice President of Market Research for Telemetry. 

This October will mark a full decade since Tesla began offering customers the opportunity to pay for "full self-driving" capability. At launch, the capability was priced at $5,000 on top of the required $3,000 enhanced autopilot capability. Over time, the price rose as high as $12,000 before dropping back down, although as of earlier this year, Tesla only offers FSD as a $99 per month subscription. Despite claims since day one from CEO Elon Musk that the Autopilot V2 hardware would support full Level 5 automated driving capability with just software updates, Tesla has had to do multiple hardware upgrades over the years and recently announced that it would have to pay for hardware upgrades for V3 hardware owners in order to continue updating the software. Despite that, no Tesla is yet capable of providing unsupervised automated driving. 

While mandatory arbitration requirements have limited the ability of owners in the U.S. to get compensation for the lack of actual full automation, regulators in various regions have tried to limit Tesla's ability to market this functionality with terms like Autopilot, Self-driving, or autonomy. However, the legal system is different in China, where a group of 10 owners has filed suit in Beijing claiming the system doesn't deliver the capabilities implied by Tesla's marketing. It seems Tesla's lawyers aren't so confident they can win this case, because just prior to the first court hearing, the automaker officially rebranded FSD in China to Tesla Assisted Driving. 

Since the SAE naming standard classifies so-called Level 2 systems, which require the human driver to constantly supervise and be ready to take full control at any time as driver assistance rather than automation, this is a more suitable name. While this is a good first step, it would be best if Tesla made this change globally. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely to happen, especially in the U.S., where federal regulators have shown almost no appetite for taking on Tesla. 

Thanks for listening.