After Tesla NACS for Charging Now FSD as Standard?

The most surprising development last year was how quickly the carmaker front crumbled when the first major OEMs for North America decided to adopt the North American Charging Standard NACS, which had been used exclusively by Tesla since 2012. Tesla owners can expect Plug&Charge operation at thousands of Superchargers and even more Destination Chargers, where no fumbling around with credit cards or charge cards leads to frustration, as owners of other electric cars sometimes experience.

In any case, all OEMs have announced their intention to switch to the NACS by 2023, thus paving the way for the use of Tesla’s comprehensive and, above all, functioning Supercharger network. The lack of such a network had proved to be an obstacle to electric car sales among manufacturers. For Tesla, this was a confirmation of its long-standing strategy of investing in its own charging infrastructure and cemented the supremacy of the American electric car pioneer.

Full Self Driving FSD as the next new standard?

Now there has been an interesting reaction to Tesla’s Full Self Driving, or FSD, software that is available on Teslas in North America. I’ve already written a few testimonials about it because it’s been available on my Tesla for a year and a half and the latest version of FSD in particular, V12.3.6 and V12.4, represented a significant leap in autonomous driving technology capabilities. See also my video of a 27-minute drive through San Francisco without intervention.

But now the CEO of the Chinese electric car manufacturer XPeng, He Xiaopeng, has tested the latest version of the Tesla FSD and he was impressed by the smooth running and handling of the vehicle thanks to the software.

FSD REVIEW: during his test drive of FSD V12.3.6 when heading towards Google Headquarters, XPeng ceo can’t help praising how precise and smooth the system is. He even goes so far as to say FSD drives better than someone new to California like himeself most of the time. FSD beats him on smooth drive and handling. Throughout the entire video, clearly there’s no hide of excitement from someone who will compete with Tesla in China pretty soon.

FSD REVIEW: during his test drive of FSD V12.3.6 when heading towards Google Headquarters, XPeng ceo can’t help praising how precise and smooth the system is. He even goes so far as to say FSD drives better than someone new to California like himeself most of the time. FSD beats… pic.twitter.com/E2J2GmTxTR

— Ray (@ray4tesla) June 26, 2024

This feedback came from the XPeng CEO, someone whose company is working on a similar Full Self Driving system and plans to approve it. Other news from last week, such as Tesla now being allowed to test FSD in China, or Tesla demonstrating FSD to legislators and authorities in Europe to start the process for approval, show that there is a certain momentum building that could make autonomous driving more accessible. Other news, such as Volkswagen entering into a partnership with the American electric car startup Rivian and planning to invest up to 5 billion dollars over the next few years to improve the software capabilities of its own cars, made people sit up and take notice.

So what if a first OEM licenses the Tesla FSD and integrates it into their own vehicles? This could be a dam break similar to the adoption of NACS last year.

Tesla’s approach of relying solely on cameras for FSD has been and continues to be criticized by other manufacturers and developers, as they believe it would – among other things – not be fail-redundant and would not provide the necessary security. However, this approach would be more cost-effective for the OEMs, as none of the still expensive lidars and other sensors would have to be installed in the vehicles. Most premium vehicles today already have more than half a dozen cameras installed, plus Tesla’s own GPUs, on which the FSD software would then run with sufficient performance. This would make the costs more manageable.

The new safety standard FSD?

If FSD were to be declared a safety standard like airbags, ABS, reversing cameras or collision avoidance, then the integration of such technology would be mandatory. And there are currently only a few providers that could offer such a solution. Besides Mobileye, that would also be Tesla.

And as soon as manufacturers license such technologies instead of developing them themselves for expensive money, only to come up with very limited ADAS or at most level 3 with very severe limitations (as BMW recently did) or not functioning at all (as recently shockingly demonstrated by Mercedes), and it becomes foreseeable that they will be prescribed as a safety standard, then there will be no holding back.

However, when experts at specialist conferences such as the one held by the German engineering association VDI (report by Alexander Bloch) on driver assistance and autonomous systems believe that this technology is still a long way off, and thus also its installation in mass-produced vehicles, and thus lull themselves and the industry into a supposed sense of security, then this is a disservice that is being done to the domestic automotive industry. The wake-up call will be a bad one.

German manufacturers are already very far behind the state of the art. Nothing makes this clearer than the KIRA project, which has just been launched as Germany’s first(!) level 4 test operation, and not with German core technologies. Both the vehicle platform (an NIO) and the self-driving technology (Mobileye) come from China and Israel/USA. And this test operation was started at least 6(!) years after the start of Waymo’s Level 4 test operations in the USA.

Tesla, who, after years of criticism and ridicule by industry experts, refused to be deterred and made the art of the big bet, is smiling big now.

This article was also published in German.