Tesla “Full Self Driving” (FSD) — Licensing Strikeout, Patent Lawsuit – CleanTechnica

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A few different Tesla Full Self Driving (FSD) stories have popped up this week. I figured I’d just quickly roll through a couple more of them in one article after covering the rather interesting story from the Netherlands.

First of all, we’ve got Elon Musk absolutely flabbergasted, apparently, that other automakers have not been interested in licensing “Full Self Driving” (FSD) from the company. Earlier today, he wrote, “I’ve tried to warn them and even offered to license Tesla FSD, but they don’t want it! Crazy….”

Last year and earlier in the year, he indicated more optimistically that some automakers were interested in the licensing option. However, it turns out that interest was overhyped, because he has a different tune on the matter now. “When legacy auto does occasionally reach out, they tepidly discuss implementing FSD for a tiny program in 5 years with unworkable requirements for Tesla, so pointless,” he added today. That’s a different tune from April 2024 when he told the investment community that one automaker was already in talks with Tesla over a potential deal, and saying in January 2025 that there was “significant interest” in licensing the technology. He also said on that January investor call that, “I think the interest level from other manufacturers to license FSD will be extremely high once it is obvious that unless you have FSD, you’re dead.”

It’s an interest topic for multiple reasons. For one, since Musk thinks FSD is the greatest thing since sliced bread, he believes it will be so transformative that demand for Tesla vehicles will skyrocket and the company will become the biggest automaker in history. However, he also wants to license FSD to other automakers … which wouldn’t make Tesla vehicles so special and would presumably hurt the opportunity to gain this skyrocketing demand. I’m a little confused, but I guess Musk just figures that Tesla could make more profits selling FSD to other automakers than selling an order of magnitude more cars.

It’s also interesting because Musk was so eager to do this nearly two years ago, and yet it seems those other automakers were right to decide the technology wasn’t fully ripe yet. You still can’t use FSD without being 100% in charge of supervising it, and there hasn’t been significant consumer demand for the feature as a result. In fact, while many automakers have seen their sales grow in the US, Tesla’s have declined. Perhaps all of that changes in 2026 if FSD takes a significant step forward. We will see. Though, for now, reportedly, the very limited FSD-powered robotaxi trials in Austin, Texas, have led to several crashes (even with paid human supervision) — so it appears the software (if not hardware) will need to improve considerably before unsupervised FSD is ready. Maybe it will be another 5 years before FSD would be useful to other automakers, or maybe they are far behind the curve and will regret it, as Musk seems to think. Only time will tell.

On a related matter, Perrone Robotics has sued Tesla over what it claims are patent infringements. The company claims Tesla has committed infringements on 5 patents related to robotics patents it has filed concerning self-driving vehicles. The violations go back 6 years, according to Perrone Robotics, and it’s also noted that the company tried to sell Tesla one of the patents in 2017. Naturally, we don’t have enough expertise on the patents or Tesla FSD or the law to make any judgement on this. So, we will just see if anything significant happens with this lawsuit and keep you updated accordingly.