A dream for many... as proposed by our fellow reddit member u/jstewart0131:

"As the world knows, Tesla owners are really into their cars and care about the continued development of the product and overall success of the company. Another quality is the willingness to actively participate in that process, ie. going to the delivery centers to help manage end of quarter rush's, giving our friends, neighbors and strangers rides in our cars, and general evangelizing about the Tesla brand and EV's as a whole. This extends to a large percentage of owners willingness to test and provide feedback on the software development side, whether it be UI, Autopilot, or FSD capabilities. Right now the Early Access Program (EAP) is limited to an invite only process. This has worked well for Tesla in the past, but now that there are greater than half a million Tesla's on the road, there are far more willing participants than there are slots available in the current program.

I believe that Tesla should revamp with a model similar to Microsoft's preview program for Windows and Xbox. Their program is open to anyone (public) and how far you can advance into more beta builds and features are based on A) your active participation in the program (the more and better feedback you provide earns you more points to advance to higher tiers) B) your own preference to how bleeding edge you want to go. Applying the MS Insider Program structure to the Tesla Early Access Program could look something like this:

Omega – Open to all Tesla owners, but only receives final release candidates of software very shortly before GA release

Delta – Open to any Tesla owners that have been part of the program for at least 1 month. this tier receives updates prior to GA release, but not as often as Beta program members. This would be a mostly stable release, but not yet ready to be a positioned as a potential release candidate build

Beta – Open to Tesla owners with 3 months of active participation in the program and achieved tier 5 status for feedback. This would be the home for those who are eager to test new features, but are not willing to be among the first owners to test new builds

Alpha – Invite only basis for the most active and tenured participants in the program. They receive the earliest releases of code, which are likely to contain the highest level of bugs. This would be the home for those who are comfortable with being the first non-employees to test new builds and features.

Inside the overall MS Insider program are sub-programs for participating in private betas of programs or features not directly coupled to the tier membership of the overall program. Tesla could adopt something similar. If an owner didn't want to go into testing new Autopilot or FSD features, but did want to participate in testing and feedback of new UI components, they could subscribe to that sub-program but stay in the Omega Tier overall.

Tesla could take a very similar approach and greatly grow the number of active testing candidates. There is of a course an order of magnitude of seriousness to testing new software on a motor vehicle than on your Xbox, so there would need to remain the same level of NDA agreements, and liability waivers that the EAP system has now but I believe this would be very successful if implemented. This would also require Tesla to create the ability to select what tier you participate in within your account, as well as the ability to move between tiers and have a more active and communicative process to announce the availability of builds and better structure the overall roll out of updates to the fleet, both production as well as EAP builds for the various tiers."

Please sign and share this petition. Together we can make it happen! :)

Link to original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/b5t6pr/tesla_should_consider_revamping_the_early_access/