Do you think Elon Musk / Tesla is not intending to make FSD Beta available as a simple toggle similar to Navigate on Autopilot right now? FSD Beta has been set up as a special installation process with a remote Safety Score and Autosteer verification before pushing an update, so the easiest step with the existing infrastructure was to have that remote check make FSD Beta software update available to the vehicle.
It probably requires a bit more effort from the Tesla Vehicle Software team to make it a plain toggle as part of the production software, but at a high level, it's similar to pushing FSD Beta software to all vehicles. There's probably some usability improvements Tesla wants to make as part of this such as potentially:
- avoiding the multi-hour delay in downloading/installing FSD Beta that people experienced with 10.69.3.1
- making it not "Early Access Program" to reduce some confusion
- simplifying the 5 strikes system to be more like the existing strikeout-until-parked system
- increasing compatibility with more software and/or hardware versions
If not for the current "wide release" approach of 10.69.3.1 excluding those on 2022.40+ or MCU1, the alternative would likely have been people waiting even longer to get an "actually wide release" and probably keeping people on FSD Beta 10.69.2.4.
Given that Tesla has done larger holiday updates in December in previous years, it would also seem natural to bundle in FSD Beta toggle as well as giving everyone FSD Beta visualizations not unlike a previous holiday update with FSD Visualization Preview.