European Tesla drivers could soon get their most wished for upgrade

It seems like we’ve been talking about self-driving cars forever, with little progress made towards actually getting there. While increasingly sophisticated systems have been developed and shown off – from Mercedes Drive Pilot to Ford’s BlueCruise – we’re still a long way from self-driving cars hitting the roads.

However, we could soon take a big step closer – Tesla's Full Self-Driving is scheduled to hit Europe in early 2025.

Tesla has firmed up its timeline for future releases via a post on X. This includes a number of interesting advancements, such as eye-tracking with sunglasses, but down at the bottom of the list we see FSD (Full Self-Driving) in Europe and China scheduled for Q1 2025.

Elon Musk followed up, saying that right-hand drive markets will hopefully be in late Q1 or early Q2, pending regulatory approval, which would include the UK.

Tesla has long offered Autopilot, which doesn’t quite live up to its name. It offers adaptive cruise control functions with steering and lane changing, designed for motorways. It’s much the same as ProPilot from Nissan and other systems.

Full Self-Driving is designed to go a step further and offer those automated functions in city streets, with the ability to negotiate junctions – but you still need to remain aware of what the car is doing and in control, so it’s still only a Level 2 system.

Ambitions are to eventually have the car make all the decisions, but it's not quite there yet.

So far, Tesla FSD hasn’t been approved in Europe or China. Regulatory approval has been a long time coming, and in the case of the EU, there’s a framework in place to approve various levels of automation, which means that Tesla’s plans could get stuck in the slow lane.

Currently, you can buy a Tesla in the UK with Full Self-Driving capability for an extra £6,800, but the “autosteer on city streets” is currently listed as “upcoming”. Elon Musk has long promised Full Self-Driving for drivers in the US, with the software going through many beta versions, which has drawn a fair amount of controversy.

While all car manufacturers are working on moving towards autonomous driving – T3 Editor-in-Chief Mat Gallagher recently sampled Mercedes’ autonomous driving system on city streets in China – it’s regulation that’s holding things up.

In the UK, the Automated Vehicles Act 2024 has at least laid out the route towards regulation, so there is hope that some of Tesla’s technology will be able to bring a boost to your car in the not too distant future.