Socar has unveiled a vehicle subscription service offering Tesla cars equipped with the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) feature and showcased it through a city driving demonstration.
Socar on the 27th held an FSD test-ride event for reporters around the Seongsu and Seoul Forest D Tower area in Seoul. After a destination was set, the vehicle drove itself for parts of the route. The course covered about 4 kilometers round trip and took roughly 25 minutes.
The FSD function activated only after the driver fastened a seat belt. During the drive, basic assistance functions such as lane keeping, traffic-signal recognition and intersection handling operated steadily, but sudden situations required immediate driver intervention.
The demonstration took place amid Seongsu’s mix of narrow streets and major roads, though the run was conducted mainly on larger roads with fewer variables. The vehicle maintained lanes, recognized signals and passed through intersections while keeping the overall flow of traffic.
Differences by driving mode were also noted. FSD offers styles ranging from “Sloth” to “Mad Max,” and the two extremes were compared during the event. Overall patterns were not sharply different, but “Mad Max” accelerated more quickly when pulling away after stops.
A Socar subscription business team manager riding in the car described the adjustment process based on personal use. “During the rollout, I tried the FSD function for about 200 kilometers, and it took a few days to get fully used to it,” the manager said. “Depending on a person’s understanding and tendencies, the speed of building trust varies widely.”
“At first, you think a lot about when to intervene,” the manager added. “But once you have enough experience, you start to distinguish what the system can handle and when the driver needs to step in.”
Socar recently introduced Tesla Model X and Tesla Model S vehicles equipped with supervised FSD and is operating them through its weekly and monthly subscription service, “Socar Subscription.” Three Tesla models are included in the lineup. Pricing is 1.49 million won per week and 3.99 million won per month. Socar said the service avoids upfront costs such as acquisition tax that come with purchasing a vehicle, and it is targeting young professionals who feel burdened by one-time purchases of high-priced cars.
Socar said its decision to offer Tesla FSD through a subscription model is tied to its longer-term vision for autonomous driving services. It described “edge case” data — unexpected situations such as sudden pedestrian entry or vehicles cutting in — as central to improving autonomous-driving AI, with the breadth of such learning shaping technical maturity.
Jang Hyeok, head of Socar’s Future Mobility TF, said, “The only companies in the world that have secured edge-case data at this scale are Tesla and Socar.” Socar said it secures more than 40,000 cases of accident and driving data annually, totaling about 220,000 cases cumulatively.
To obtain more advanced data, Socar said it is testing one full sensor-kit vehicle equipped with LiDAR, seven cameras, and GPS·IMU. It plans to expand that fleet step by step to as many as 1,000 vehicles to improve the quality of autonomous-driving training data.
* This article has been translated by AI.
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