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InsideEVs
InsideEVs
Technology
Steven Loveday

Tesla's New Full Self-Driving Update Has Loads Of Potential Improvements

Tesla has been continuously providing over-the-air software updates in an effort to incrementally improve its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta software. We've been reading a lot about recent improvements, however, the company hasn't provided an official update for some time. Now, FSD Beta version 10.12 is reportedly rolling out to Tesla employees.

When Tesla completes an update, it gets rolled out to employees' cars first, following internal testing. Once the company determines that it's working as planned, it begins to roll it out to the long list of FSD Beta testers, which now exceeds 100,000, according to CEO Elon Musk.

As Musk has noted in the past, while the goal of these updates is to improve the software, there are often regressions as well. In an attempt to roll out the updates in the safest manner, Tesla must first make sure that the new code doesn't cause any issues or regressions. 

Just over a week ago, Musk noted that the update would likely come this weekend, and he added that it includes a lot of code updates. He suggested that this could lead to "much" being discovered during testing.

 

As a reply to a tweet in the thread, Musk also added that the release notes for the upcoming version would be lengthy.

 

Now that employees are getting the update, the release notes have been shared on social media, and they're certainly long as Musk suggested.

 

It looks like there are about 20 bullet points in the release notes, and some of them seem quite involved. Most points begin with the word "improved," which is obviously the goal. However, as usual, we'll have to wait and see what FSD Beta testers experience and share in the coming weeks.

Tesla shares in the release that it used some 250,000 video clips to train the software for this latest update. According to Electrek, this is the first time Tesla has referred to fleet video clips in its release notes. Based on the notes, the bulk of improvements seems to be focused on FSD Beta system confidence.

As reported by Teslarati, if the employee rollout of version 10.12 is successful, Musk says Tesla may begin rolling out version 10.12.2 to FSD Beta testers with a score of 95 or higher, which would likely expand the testing pool significantly. 

 

Musk also recently suggested that he's confident Tesla could have as many as 1 million Full Self-Driving Beta testers on the road by the end of this year. Keep in mind that Musk has been making such promises for years.

That said, most were well before the FSD Beta program and Safety Score program were actually underway. Moreover, many people didn't likely expect to learn that over 100,000 people are now using and testing the technology, and there have been few major issues.

Do you think Tesla will follow through with lowering the Safety Score requirement to folks with a 95 or better? Is 1 million FSD Beta testers a realistic goal in 2022? Leave us your thoughts in the comment section below.

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