Tesla is cooperating with car-sharing and rental platform Turo to expand chances for people to try its advanced driver-assistance system Full Self-Driving (FSD, supervised).

TechCrunch and other outlets reported on Oct. 26 that from Oct. 28 Turo will separately mark Teslas with FSD enabled in vehicle listings in the United States and allow users to search for those cars.

Turo plans to link directly with Tesla to check whether a vehicle has FSD enabled. It will also provide a one-month free FSD trial to some hosts who list vehicles. After that, the subscription fee is $99 a month, and hosts can recoup the cost by reflecting it in the daily rental fee. Turo did not say whether rental prices for FSD vehicles would be set higher than for regular vehicles. The company said several thousand Teslas with FSD already enabled are listed.

The cooperation aligns with Tesla's strategy to increase paid FSD users. Tesla said last week paid FSD subscribers worldwide total about 1.7 million people. More than 75 percent of customers who took delivery of vehicles in North America in the third quarter signed up for FSD subscriptions, up about 20 percent from the second quarter. Vehicle sales in the United States fell over the same period.

Tesla has reorganised some stores over the past year to focus on FSD. Elon Musk (일론 머스크) recently said, "People are buying FSD with a car attached, not the other way around." Vaibhav Taneja (바이바브 타네자), Tesla's chief financial officer, also said during an earnings call that there were more cases of customers asking first about an FSD test drive rather than about the vehicle model.

Turo also expects the cooperation to boost rental demand for popular models and expand earning opportunities for hosts. Turo said the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y ranked third and fourth, respectively, among the most popular models on its platform this year. Andre Haddad (안드레 하다드), Turo's chief executive, introduced the link-up as an "industry-first integration with Tesla". In Turo's own survey, 55 percent of Americans and 71 percent of Generation Z showed interest in driverless technology while travelling.

FSD is a Level 2 driver-assistance system that requires driver supervision and is not fully driverless technology. Turo instructs users to keep monitoring the system while driving and to be ready to intervene at any time, and it also provides Tesla-made user guide videos. Concerns have also been raised that users could overtrust the feature because vehicle listings allow owners to promote their cars as self-driving.

The cooperation is meaningful in that Tesla lets users who do not directly own vehicles experience FSD, while Turo offers a differentiated rental service. It has not been clearly disclosed who would be responsible among the user, the vehicle owner and Turo if an accident occurs while using FSD.

People are buying FSD with a car attached, not the other way around