Tesla’s Autonomous Driving efforts have taken another important step forward today. Software version 2021.32.25 is now being rolled out to around 1,000 new participants, adding to the 2,000 existing testers.
The new batch of testers is made up of Tesla owners who purchased or subscribed to the FSD Beta. This first wave is being sent out to people who achieved a perfect 100 score in Tesla’s Safety Score rating.
By rolling out Tesla software to a larger group of testers, Tesla has also dropped the NDA applied to most FSD Beta drivers. New users have been sent a welcome email, cautioning them about the software, highlighting that this is in beta and requires a higher level of supervision than normal Autopilot.
Tesla’s Full Self Driving Beta still requires drivers to be responsible for the vehicle and when the software makes a mistake, they are required to intervene and take control. As the software improves, the amount of zero-intervention drives should increase with each release.
With around 3,000+ users participating in the FSD Beta, this makes it one of the largest, if not the largest autonomous efforts in the world. While competitors like Waymo and Cruise are at a very different stage of their autonomous developments, Tesla has many more vehicles in their fleet to extract data from.
FSD Beta is turning corners, taking roundabouts, driving on unmarked city streets and navigates around obstacles, even using drivable space and crossing lane lines where required. A big differentiator with Tesla’s approach is that this technology is shipping in customer vehicles, rather than managed fleet vehicles.
In one of the first videos of FSD Beta 10.2 in action, the visualisations look very similar to 10.1.
There are some users however who did meet the 100 Safety Score benchmark, who still haven’t received the update.
For those Tesla owners who pushed the button and requested the FSD Beta, but didn’t get 100 in the Safety Score, it is pretty unknown as to how long the wait will be until you get the Beta. Elon has said they will monitor the first batch of users for a few days.
In theory, if there are no issues (like a suite of accidents) then Tesla is likely to roll out the Beta to those who scored 99, then 98, then 97 and so on. This could take weeks or months to fully roll out to all who requested the Beta in the US and at some point, Tesla needs to roll this out internationally.
The release notes for FSD Beta 10.2 contains the same familiar notes, which doesn’t shed any light on the changes in this release.
