Tesla first released the Full Self-Driving beta to customers in 2020.
The initial rollout happened in October 2020, when Tesla sent a rewritten version of its driving software to a limited group of Early Access Program users in the United States. The feature was called “City Streets” and was designed to handle urban driving tasks beyond the earlier highway-focused Autopilot functions.
This was a restricted beta, not a general release. Tesla expanded access gradually, using driver-attention requirements and later its proprietary Safety Score system. A broader rollout began in 2021, which is why some timelines mistakenly identify that year as the launch date. The Full Self-Driving name also causes confusion: despite the branding, the beta required an attentive human driver and was not a fully autonomous system.
Tesla’s 2020 release was therefore the first customer-facing FSD beta, while later years marked expansion to increasingly larger groups of owners and regions.