Tesla’s progress toward fully autonomous driving may be advancing faster than many investors expect, according to a new report from Piper Sandler.
Analyst Alexander Potter wrote that the firm’s latest conversation with the creator of the FSD Community Tracker indicates Tesla is “getting very close to unsupervised FSD.” This conclusion comes from sharp improvements seen in key performance metrics.
Piper Sandler highlighted that the tracker’s main metric, “miles to critical disengagement,” recorded a major leap after the release of FSD v14.1.x in October. The figure jumped more than twentyfold, rising from 441 miles in the earlier version to more than 9,200 miles.
Potter described this as the largest sequential improvement in the tracker’s four-year history. Additional data from Austin also reinforced the trend.
According to Piper Sandler, Austin results suggest roughly 40,000 miles between crashes, based on seven NHTSA incidents across about 280,000 miles. At an average of 13,000 miles driven per year, an FSD-enabled vehicle could theoretically go close to three years without a crash.
The analysts also noted that tracker readings showing more than 9,000 miles between disengagements align with the Austin data.
However, performance in the following software update, v14.2.x, appeared weaker, falling to around 1,500 miles per critical disengagement. Piper Sandler cautioned that this decline is not fully meaningful. The firm believes the lower figures are partly due to limited usable data. Although 17,000 miles have been collected, only 4,500 miles qualify for tracking critical disengagements. More than 70% of the logged miles come from an AI device that does not record disengagement events.
Piper Sandler expects performance to improve again as more data is gathered. The firm added that some of the recent setbacks may not be corrected until the release of FSD v14.3.
The report concluded that Tesla is likely very close to removing safety operators from its Austin robo-taxis.
