Nearly 150,000 Tesla cars are using the company's new "safety score," a tool rolled out last month to determine whether owners can access the beta version of its "Full Self-Driving" software, executives said during its third quarter earnings call. While 150,000 cars are now part of the Full-Self Driving (FSD) beta enrollment program, a fraction of drivers have been given access to the software. Only 2,000 drivers have been able to test the FSD program over the past year. Earlier this month, Tesla rolled out version 10.2 to around 1,000 additional owners with perfect safety scores. Tesla charges $10,000 for the FSD software, which CEO Elon Musk has promised for years will one day deliver full autonomous driving capabilities.

It's 2021 and nearly 7 percent of the US workforce is currently idle on account of the pandemic but heck if Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn't still making money hand over fist. He's surpassed Jeff Bezos as the richest person on the planet over the past year, all while his company has delivered a record number of electric vehicles to Tesla customers worldwide. The company reportedly handed off 499,550 vehicles in 2020 -- just a hair shy of its 500k delivery target and a 36 percent increase over 2019's delivery figures. The company credits strong sales of the Model Y in the Chinese market for helping reach that high water mark. "Given Tesla's stock doubling again since November, we believe... bulls are betting on Tesla leading commercialization of autonomous vehicles technology," Oppenheimer analyst Colin Rusch told Yahoo! Finance in a note last week.