Tesla's Self-Driving Beta Software Unlocked By Hacking Community

Tesla Inc TSLA is working towards fully autonomous cars. The company stated that every car it sells today comes with the hardware necessary for full self-driving; the software just needs to catch up to the task.

Tesla has rolled its FSD Beta program out to a small set of testers who have shown the car can make impressive moves, such as dodging a deer on dirt roads. 

But now it seems some unauthorized users have gained access to this advanced feature.

According to Electrek, the FSD Beta has been circulating around the "Tesla hacker" community for a while. But now the first evidence of this has been posted to YouTube by a user in Ukraine. 

Some of the firmware files have leaked, allowing users with root access to enable the Beta on their vehicles. This comes at a time when many owners are willing to try the software, as they have paid for it and are awaiting Tesla to give it the wide release that CEO Elon Musk said could be coming by the end of the month. 

The video shows the software running pretty well in Ukraine, an area not officially supported and Tesla has not set the software to work. While companies such as Waymo geo lock where their self-driving software can run, Tesla is looking for a general self-driving solution that can potentially work anywhere.

Benzinga's Take: While even the small FSD Beta rollout has been questioned, this is an entirely different issue. If someone using this unsupported software were to cause an accident, would Tesla still bear any of the responsibility?

To date, no accidents have occurred with Tesla's Beta software, so questions like this are unknown, but become more complex with hackers gaining access to features they are not meant to be using. 

Photo courtesy of Tesla