From Torque News.

Today, we’re talking about something that’s got the EV community buzzing: Elon Musk’s latest tweet on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving – or FSD – and why it might take a whopping 10 billion miles of real-world data to make unsupervised autonomous driving a reality. He gave an update on when Tesla can achieve full FSD safely and what Tesla needs for it.

Just today, on January 8, 2026, Elon Musk replied to a thread by Phil Beisel, a former Apple and Rivian engineer, about NVIDIA’s big CES announcements on autonomy. Musk dropped this bombshell: "Roughly 10 billion miles of training data is needed to achieve safe unsupervised self-driving. Reality has a super long tail of complexity."

Whoa, 10 billion miles? That’s like driving to the moon and back over 20,000 times! If you’re wondering "what is Tesla FSD and how does it work," let me explain it simply. Full Self-Driving is Tesla’s advanced driver-assistance system that’s evolving into true autonomy – think cars that drive themselves without you touching the wheel, even in tricky city streets. But to get there safely, Tesla relies on massive amounts of real-world driving data from its fleet of vehicles. Right now, they’re logging about 14 million supervised miles every single day. That’s data from actual Tesla owners using FSD in beta mode, feeding back into the system to train the AI.

This is Armen Hareyan from Torque News. Please follow us at https://twitter.com/torquenewsauto on Twitter and https://www.torquenews.com for daily automotive news. Also, follow us on Telegram at https://t.me/teslaev

Reference: Elon Musk’s post on X https://x.com/elonmusk/status/2009161554785128729