Musk Says Next FSD Model Adds “Big Missing Piece”

Tesla’s next major leap in Full Self-Driving (FSD) may be closer than anyone expected, as CEO Elon Musk recently revealed that the new model is only a month or two away, calling it “the last big piece of the puzzle.”

Coming from Musk, that phrasing carries weight. For years, Tesla has inched toward full autonomy through incremental updates. Now, the company seems to believe the last stretch is finally in sight.

Musk reiterated that unsupervised FSD is “pretty much solved,” adding that Safety Monitors will be removed within the next three weeks, a change long viewed as a critical milestone for Tesla’s Robotaxi ambitions. 

But the bigger surprise is what comes next. It’s a much larger FSD model, arriving in early 2026, built for deeper reasoning and powered by reinforcement learning at a scale Tesla has never attempted.

Tesla’s Confidence Rises – and So Do the Stakes

Musk described the upcoming FSD architecture as “an order of magnitude larger,” suggesting a dramatic jump in how Tesla vehicles understand, interpret, and predict the world around them. Scaling that capability, however, introduces a new challenge.

According to the Tesla CEO, his company may ultimately need to build its own giant chip fabrication plant to deliver “a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year.” Specifically, he said:

“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL [reinforcement learning]. To get to a serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”

In other words, the path to autonomy demands industrial-scale hardware production that doesn’t yet exist.

His comments echo statements from late November, when Musk said version 14.3 is where “the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.” Early driver feedback seems to support that sentiment. Monitoring alerts are already less aggressive in v14.2.1, and Tesla insiders suggest the system is inching closer to allowing drivers to fully take their eyes off the road.

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