Tesla FSD owners score Australian-first insurance win

For the first time in Australia, letting your car do the driving could actually make your insurance cheaper.

Zurich Australian Insurance Limited has announced it will include Tesla's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) technology as a rating factor in its InsureMyTesla product – an Australian first, and only the second time an insurer anywhere in the world has done it.

"We're pleased to see the insurance industry recognising the safety and value of FSD (Supervised)," said Tesla Australia and New Zealand director, Thom Drew.

Insurers are not known for their sentimentality. They deal in spreadsheet and numbers, not vibes. So when one of them decides a piece of automotive software makes you a safer bet, people take notice.

The numbers Zurich is leaning on come from Tesla, which says vehicles using FSD (Supervised) are involved in seven times fewer major or minor collisions than standard EVs.

"The data is clear – FSD (Supervised) is making driving significantly safer, and it's encouraging to see InsureMyTesla by Zurich pioneering this benefit and reflecting the reduced risk for Tesla owners," said regional Tesla boss.

Those cars run eight external cameras giving a 360-degree view of the world, chewing through more than one million pixels of visual data every millisecond – which is rather more than the average human manages on the freeway at 8am.

Uptake here has been rapid. Since FSD (Supervised) launched in Australia and New Zealand in October 2025, local owners had racked up one million kilometres of self-driven travel within a fortnight.

That figure now sits beyond 132 million kilometres, representing a more than five-fold increase in average daily use since launch.

"As vehicle technology and driver behaviour continues to evolve at an extraordinary pace, it is critical that we continue to innovate alongside this change," said Alex Morgan, Head of General Insurance at Zurich.

"By combining Tesla's fine-grained data with Zurich's sophisticated underwriting technology and motor expertise, this expanded proposition offers the same high-quality insurance at a more affordable cost due to the reduced risk associated with supervised self-driving," Morgan stated.

It's also worth remembering what FSD (Supervised) actually is.

When we sampled the system on public roads in Brisbane, it proved extraordinary – but the ‘supervised’ brackets matter. This is still a Level 2 driver assistance system, the human is still legally responsible, and it still got stumped once or twice.

Which raises the awkward bit. If a machine is making the driving decisions and something goes wrong, who wears it?

Right now the answer is straightforward, because the supervising human is on the hook.

But the further this technology travels, the muddier the waters may get. Insurers, regulators and lawyers are all going to have to work out how blame gets apportioned when the thing behind the wheel doesn't have hands.

Call it a baby step, because that's what it is. But it's a telling one. Insurance pricing is the market putting a dollar figure on risk, and the market has just decided supervised autonomy is less risky than a human going it alone.

This is a significant moment in the evolution of private transport.

"The data shows that drivers using this technology are involved in far fewer accidents, so it's important they can access insurance that reflects this lower risk," said David Toma, product manager at Zurich.

"This is a really exciting milestone – both for Tesla owners who are rapidly adopting this FSD (Supervised) technology, and for Zurich as the first insurer in Australia to actively lean into this space. "

In the United States, where Waymo is running driverless taxis in multiple cities, full vehicle autonomy starts looking less like science fiction and more like the norm.

Australian road rules don't currently permit it, and XPeng is already flagging its rival XNGP system for export markets from 2027, so the competitive pressure is building.

The regulators will get there eventually. The insurers, it seems, got there first.

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