Tesla is now offering free Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised 30-day trials in some of its key markets to help boost adoption rates of the company’s semi-autonomous driving software suite.

The company reposted a gift emoji when reposting the post from the Tesla and EV news account run by Sawyer Merritt.

New and existing customers of eligible vehicles with Hardware 4 inside can access the 30-day trial if they install version 14.2 of the software in either a Model S, Model 3, Model X, Model Y or a Cybertruck.

Owners in North America located in either United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico or Canada will be eligible for this trial, with an estimated 1.5 million Tesla customers who are yet to subscribe to the FSD supervised software.

Following that trial, owners can subscribe to the software for $US99 per month in the United States and $CAD99 per month in Canada.

The timing of the trial comes just in time for Christmas and winter holidays in North Amercia when hundreds of thousands of owners will be travelling, helping make longer distances a little easier.

Locally, in September this year, Tesla announced the FSD supervised software to all eligible cars in Australia and New Zealand, making them the first right-hand-drive markets in the world to obtain the landmark technology.

Within a fortnight of the software’s local availability, Tesla revealed that it’s already been used for more than 1 million kilometres by owners across Australia and New Zealand.

Earlier this month, Tesla undertook a world first in Australia by undertaking a bulk FSD test drive event at the Everything Electric show in Melbourne. Over the three days of the event, Tesla provided over 600 drives using dozens of vehicles.

Also in November, Tesla hit the 150,000 EVs milestone in Australia, 18 months after surpassing 100,000 EVs with the latest focus on FSD and autonomous driving as one of its vehicles’ key technologies.

At this stage, the trial appears to be focused to North American owners but we do find this a great way to increase awareness and adoption of the recent developments the company has made with its software, helping reduce accidents and improving the overall driving experience.

It would be great to see similar initiatives for eligible vehicles in markets like Australia and New Zealand in coming months, enabling many more drivers to experience this tech for the very first time. Based on our experiences with the tech in local testing, it really needs to be experienced to see the benefits it brings to daily driving.

Riz is the founder of carloop based in Melbourne, specialising in Australian EV data, insight reports and trends. He is a mechanical engineer who spent the first 7 years of his career building transport infrastructure before starting carloop. He has a passion for cars, particularly EVs and wants to help reduce transport emissions in Australia. He currently drives a red Tesla Model 3.