Tesla has started to finally push a new Supervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) software update after a few months of delays.
Elon Musk has bet Tesla’s house on self-driving and now the company needs to deliver more than ever.
We were particularly impressed with Tesla’s FSD v12 update. It was by far the biggest improvement in the more than two years since I used FSD Beta. However, I noted that we now need to see consistent improvements through regular software updates to start seeing a path toward an unsupervised self-driving system, which is what Tesla has been promising.
Tesla FSD v12 came in January, and while Tesla has released a few updates since, all the main updates that were tested with a small group of owners never made it to the wider fleet – pointing toward problems.
Musk has hyped up several new updates, including v12.4 and v12.5, over the last few months, but not many improvements have made it to the fleet since the first v12 update.
v12.4 has been in testing for months, but Tesla has been tentative about releasing the update to the wider fleet… until now.
Teslascope now reports that the update, or more specifically, v12.4.3, is finally being pushed to the wider fleet:
This update has been hyped up a lot by Musk. The CEO even claimed that people will be able to drive a year between interventions on FSD v12.4.
That would be surprising since most FSD drivers are experiencing several interventions per day of driving.
However, we recently learned that Tesla has spent a disproportionate amount of data annotation resources on routes taken by Musk and Tesla influencers. According to Tesla insiders, this results in Tesla’s neural nets being optimized for them and, ultimately, the results are an unrepresentative experience compared to the average FSD driver.
Electrek’s Take
With v12’s end-to-end neural nets and Elon claiming that Tesla is not compute training constraint anymore, we were expecting more progress faster, but there’s been very little progress on the customer’s end in the past 6 months.
This is putting a lot of pressure on v12.4.
I can’t wait to try it, but I’m managing my expectations. I’d be surprised if I could go a week without intervention with v12.4.
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