Why Automakers Keep Turning Down Elon Musk’s Tesla Full Self-Driving Offer
Unlike the NACS charging standard, licensing FSD requires adopting Tesla's hardware and sharing critical vehicle data.
Tesla’s standing offer to license its Full Self-Driving (FSD) software to other automakers remains unclaimed, a status confirmed by CEO Elon Musk in a brief response on X this week.
What Happened
Musk replied "Exactly" to a post by Sawyer Merritt stating that Tesla has openly invited other automakers to license FSD for years, yet none have accepted. This confirmation comes in response to a prediction by Boom Supersonic founder Blake Scholl, who suggested Tesla would eventually open FSD to rivals in the same way it opened its Supercharger network. Tesla has floated this licensing option publicly since at least 2021. In November, Musk characterized legacy automakers' reluctance to adopt FSD as "crazy," underscoring the company's continued interest in expanding the software's reach.
Why It Matters
The comparison to the NACS charging standard highlights a critical distinction in adoption barriers. While NACS became the de facto standard with rapid uptake from Ford, GM, and Rivian, FSD licensing presents structural hurdles that a plug specification does not. Licensing FSD requires automakers to adopt Tesla’s specific eight-camera layout and onboard compute architecture, effectively making their vehicles Tesla hardware wearing another brand's badge. Furthermore, the software stack would report telemetry data back to Tesla, providing the EV maker with continuous insight into how competitor vehicles are driven, where they struggle, and driver intervention rates. For automakers developing their own autonomy programs or guarding proprietary safety data, this loss of data privacy and hardware independence is a cost that outweighs the benefit of bypassing years of R&D investment.
The Bottom Line
Despite the competitive pressure from Waymo and Zoox logging hundreds of thousands of unsupervised miles, legacy automakers have not taken Tesla’s offer to license FSD. The decision appears driven by the significant trade-offs required to integrate Tesla's hardware-dependent stack and share sensitive operational data, rather than the simple interoperability that drove NACS adoption.
